Case Study / Future X Smart Stores
SK-II
Creating the future of retail experiences for Asia’s beloved beauty brand.
Aimed at disrupting how younger generations shop for beauty, we piloted various retail innovations for luxury skincare brand SK-II across cities in China, Japan, and Southeast Asia to gain insights and enrich the customer experience in growing markets.
Overview
Over a multi-year engagement, we partnered with SK-II to craft global retail and immersive brand experiences that created deeper connections with the next generation of consumers. While SK-II was enjoying explosive growth in China, it remained steadfast in reinvigorating its younger audiences in Japan and Southeast Asia with compelling retail innovations.
The Future X Smart Store was our answer to meet consumers with an experience that could not only provide enhanced skin care counseling, but a personalized shopping journey in the store—combining both the familiar traditions of physical retail environments with new layers of innovative digital experiences.
In my role as Associate Creative Director, I worked across multiple time zones to manage the conception and production of various retail experiences in the physical stores, including the art direction and design of all digital interfaces. Collaborating with brand designers, experience designers, industrial designers and technologists, we designed and built to-scale prototypes in our Brooklyn studio that informed the final installations in Shanghai, and every location thereafter.
SK-II Future X at K11 in Shanghai, China
Future X Concept
Future X represented more than the future customer experience—it pioneered the way forward for the beauty industry, and became the north star for personalized, nuanced in-store service relating specifically to skincare needs. Integrating a number of technologies such as facial recognition, artificial intelligence, eye tracking, physical sensors and real-time responsive displays, Future X Smart Stores delivered immersive, memorable experiences for consumers of every demographic.
Crafting a more personal end-to-end experience
Each experience throughout the in-store customer journey was intentionally designed to feel personal. This foundational principle was amplified by the use of facial recognition and physical gesture tracking, allowing customers to interact with the brand naturally and have a seamless shopping experience without unnecessary friction.
An interactive introduction
Upon entering the store, visitors were able to create a personal connection to the brand using their most unique feature—their face. In partnership with Rare Volume, we designed an interactive portrait installation that generated real-time visual responses to visitors’ facial expressions using high-resolution cameras paired with custom software. The playful and immersive experience served as an introduction to the idea that skincare was quite unique to each person.
Art of You: an interactive portrait installation powered by machine learning that transforms facial expressions of each user into a unique work of art.
Core elements of the Future X experience:
Skin Scan: A skin analysis kiosk with SK-II’s proprietary scan technology that evaluates each user’s skin using high-resolution photography while capturing unique facial IDs to unlock digital experiences in the store.
Results Wall: A dynamic and vivid digital display that uses facial recognition to instantly identify users and reveal their personalized scan results.
Beauty Bar: A product trial counter that activates with facial recognition and provides personalized recommendations based on each customer’s scan results.
Retail Table: A touchless digital shopping experience using physical products and projection mapping, where customers can add products to their cart by gesturing with their hands and tapping a RFID-bracelet.
Gesture-based shopping
Within the store, we created product discovery tables that came to life with projection mapping. Each table was controlled by visitors’ hand gestures, allowing each user to point at products to transform the projected surface into dynamic, colorful displays of product information. In Shanghai specifically, we launched a shoppable version of this table that allowed WeChat users the ability to check out on the spot, simply by tapping an RFID-enabled wristband to the table surface.
Retail table UI, tabletop view
Evolving the concept of Future X across the globe.
The experiences built for Future X initially launched in Tokyo and expanded to Shanghai, Singapore, Las Vegas, San Francisco, and Hainan, totaling 8+ activations in a span of 6 years. With each launch was an opportunity to evolve the customer journey and experiment with new, effective ways to push the boundaries of physical retail experiences.
SK-II Future X Highlights Video
Project credits and info
My role: Associate Creative Director
Collaborators: Steve Croll, Joe Donnelley, Emil Lanne, Andrew Levy, Jacqueline Pifer, Ari Weinkle
Tech partner: Rare Volume (The Art of You)
Agency: Huge
Client: SK-II
Retail Innovation, Brand Experience, XR, Spatial Design, Interaction Design, Brand Design, Physical-Digital Experience
Next: SK-II Confetti Pop-ups
Building on the momentum of Future X Smart Stores, SK-II took the ‘centre stage’ at Tokyo’s most prestigious retail destination, Isetan. Bringing to life the special ‘Confetti’ edition of SK-II’s most popular product, our team designed a tech-driven innovative retail experience aimed at driving trial and purchase.