It’s the Gifting Season: that time of the year when luxury brands seek to weave the most exceptionally emotionally compelling stories for their discerning audiences. To lend some extra sparkle to their 2024 holiday campaigns, Dior collaborated with two members of the latest cohort of La Maison des Startups LVMH – Ircam Amplify & xydrobe – who gave us a preview of their innovative marketing solutions on
both sides of the Channel.
When it came time to repatriate the Christian Dior Couture holiday windows that had wowed crowds at the New York’s Saks department store last year, to the Avenue Montaigne flagship in Paris for the 2024 holidays, the Maison decided to add some more French flair to the display. An exceptional, bespoke soundscape from Paris-based sound architects Ircam Amplify.
According to Managing Director Alexis Botaya who runs the Sound Experience activities, this collaboration is truly “magical” as it’s all “about Christmas, as well as playing on the heritage of Christian Dior and his atelier”. When asked what the display actually sounds like, Alexis is coy – refusing to ruin the surprise – though he hints a special show takes place on the boutique’s famous façade every 15 minutes. He is however more expansive when describing the process of using sound to capture a brand’s DNA. One that sounds rather magical too…
“We use a unique methodology from France’s Ircam Institute – which we are affiliated with and has been researching the power of sound for 40 years. It’s known as the ‘SPEAK’ method and allows our engineers to use the brief shared by our client (consisting of key words, visuals and other documents capturing a brand’s history, values, and identity) to produce a tailor-made sound. Our job is to transcribe the emotions evoked by the brand into emotions expressed through sounds. We want you to listen to a universe, understand its emotions through your ears.”
Alexis adds that Ircam Amplify helps Maisons like Christian Dior Couture to not only harness what he calls “sound’s superpowers” to elicit these emotions from clients, but also to make their experiences highly memorable: a double whammy translating into increased engagement and sales for brands.
Across the pond, at London’s Harrods department store, another member of La Maison des Startups LVMH Season 10, has been adding va-va-voom to Parfums Christian Dior’s (PCD) holiday campaign with their Virtual Reality offering.
“xydrobe’s cinema at Harrods during the 2024 holiday season is an extrapolation of our original product, which is a single one-person multi-sensory pod” says co-founder Nell Loyd-Malcolm. “This is a multi-person version: 20 people can be sat at any given time; we can have showings every 15 minutes which means we can get 500 people in per day; so, there’s an opportunity for Parfum Christian Dior to see over 20 000 people over the experience run, which is awesome!”.
The British startup was born out of the belief Virtual Reality could be used to greater effect by luxury brands for their storytelling. “We take something that might traditionally be categorized as advertising and add a layer of creativity that turns it into something that feels tangible, that people feel truly immersed in. It doesn’t necessarily feel like you’re being sold anything, more like entertainment. We’re delivering great theater for retail… And who doesn’t want to get inside the world of Dior?”
This collaboration marks a big first for xydrobe: “Usually when brands work with us we’re creating content from the ground-up. Here, we’ve taken PCD’s Christmas campaign advertising which is 1-minute 30s originally and converted that into a Virtual Reality experience making it just under 4 minutes and a half. We’ve slowed it down so that when the fragrance is on-screen you can smell it as you enter the world of the Palais of Versailles.
This experience with Dior, which took just 5 weeks to make happen – an amazing turnaround time! – means that there is a massive opportunity for brands that have already heavily invested in amazing 2D content to then have a multisensory, immersive version of it quite quickly and at a more accessible price point” says Nell.
She concludes: “We collect a lot of data and we’ve seen that there are amazing sales conversions rates following immersive experiences like this one. Brands have been selling 75% more from having a xydrobe experience in the store week-on-week. But best of all, lived experiences like these are epic for the customer: they’re so inspired and influenced by it, because it brings them sheer joy!”.
Which is after all what the Gifting Season is all about…
Want to create your own bespoke collaboration for your Maison with Ircam Amplify, xydrobe or another La Maison des Startups LVMH solution? Then please contact either louise.longuepee@lvmh.com or emma.ceccaldi.ext@lvmh.com.
