Beyond The Visual: Sensorial Shopping
BUILDING RICHER BRAND WORLDS
Beyond the visual, the likes and shares- what really moves us is sensory richness. Taste, touch, sight, scent considered together to create emotional depth. In today’s digital-first world, this approach is what differentiates.
One of our future retail trend predictions? The use of sensorially emotive experiences to build richer brand worlds. Scent, sight, sounds, tactility, even taste are powerful tools that can be used to build understanding and add depth to brand expression. As consumers, we are much less rational than we would like to think, with between 85% and 95% of purchase decisions being subconscious.
This means that creating emotional connection is extremely effective in influencing purchase behaviour and brand affinity. Consideration of a user’s holistic experience across all their senses is an evolution of the established ‘Hyperphysical retail’ macro trend. The rejection of digital-first design for retail spaces has for some time been a primary consideration for physical stores, now this hyper physicality addresses fully immersive sensory experiences.
How does a brand harness the power of the senses to craft a more emotionally rich, resonant, and evocative expression of their personality and purpose?
There are various ways that sensorial design can be leveraged- to bring product detail and provenance to life, to add depth to a brand story with sense of place, to carefully balance stimulus to direct and hold customer attention. In this blog, and our accompanying retail highlights report, we explore some of the best-in-class examples of how sensorial design is used for innovative and memorable retail experiences.
Transcend the need for immediate purchases- online is for convenience; only in person can you make memories.
Enriching experiences
Documents is an innovative fragrance brand and a leader in New Chinese Style. Their ‘Bold Zen’ position is a combination of traditional and new Chinese culture, aesthetics, and philosophy that markets directly to the young who are artistic-minded and attracted to, and champion, traditional Chinese heritage. Their stores look to capture the ephemeral; both the intangible nature of the product itself, but on a deeper level also the cultural heritage, collective memory, and nuanced taste level of their guochao customer.
The brand does this with a symphony of sensorial cues through their physical stores. Layering tactile materiality, scent landscapes, rich colour drench, and referential cues that evoke specific time and place. Their contemporary reinterpretation of heritage and elegance infuses cultural spirit and artistic sensibility into modern design.
[Image Credit: Documents]
The world of whiskey is steeped in heritage and deeply connected to the natural environment that shapes the product, and The Glenlivet distillery experience brings these layers to life through rich sensory activation.
Illustrating the whiskey’s intrinsic relationship with the terroir of the Cairngorms National Park, the experience is a multifaceted evocation Scottish wilderness surrounding the distillery. Visual and tactile elements crafted by local artisans reflect the landscape. A sweeping indoor field of barley and a custom chandelier made from dried wildflowers native to Scotland, ground the space in its natural origins. A 3D-routed topography of the Glenlivet valley brought to life with motion graphic projection vividly animates the distillery’s local setting. Throughout, carefully curated uses of colour, light, and warmth recall the comforting and inviting essence of the whiskey itself.
[Image Credit: Glenlivet Distillery]
Educating through emotion
Sensory activations allow for brands to move beyond traditional product or provenance education to inform in a more effective and memorable way. Scent powerfully recalls feelings or places, soundscapes evoke mood and tone that subtly reinforce product positioning, and taste and touch elevate understanding of quality, cultural origin, and the experience of the product in use. Leveraging a suite of harmonious sensory touchpoints creates layered experiences that leave stronger impressions than descriptive or visual information presentation alone.
Cosmetics leader Glossier launched the ‘You’ fragrance with a richly sensorial and immersive pop up activation that rethinks how fragrance can be described. The ‘Realms of You’ activation deconstructs the brand’s signature scent through the conceptual lens of the five senses.
Far from the typical tropes of simply showing fragrance notes and ingredients or bringing product personality to life with aspirational model photography, this activation focuses on esoteric evocations to craft a more nuanced and subconscious understanding of the product. The red gloves, the bold mono-colour, the faceted expression of the perfume notes, all play a role in the experience, symbolising the varied qualities of the fragrance and making tangible the product- elevating the process of customer education.
[Image Credit: Henry Bourne]
For Milan Design Week, Lavazza presented Source of Pleasure, a large-scale installation that explores coffee through spatial and sensory cues. The experience engages by not presenting coffee as simply a drink, instead building an encompassing evocation of the daily rituals, emotional cues, and memories it activates.
Within its large circular form, a rich palette of tactile materials echo the colour of roasted coffee, the structure reflecting both the raw material and the ritual that surrounds it. The scent of coffee permeates the space, enriching the visual minimalism with an unmistakable sensory reference.
Though monumental in scale, the experience is far from obviously theatrical. Instead, visitors are immersed into an intentionally sparse environment that invites pause, smell, touch, and a sense of stillness that makes space for contemplation. The enveloping nature of both structure and atmosphere disconnects from the bustle of the Salon environment allowing for focus on the abstract and deeply emotionally resonant cues presented within.
[Image Credit: Andrea Guermani]
Evoking time and place, harnessing nostalgia
A sense of place isn’t simply geographical. Our understanding, our memories of a place and time are emotional, cultural, and atmospheric. Sensory activations recreate or suggest these elements, enabling people to feel transported, connected. When these sensory cues are layered thoughtfully, they build a deep emotional and spatial memory, making the place feel real. This is especially powerful where brands root their identity in origin and authenticity.
An Unesco world heritage site, steeped in historic and cultural beauty, Kyoto- the artisan capital of Japan- is the perfect choice for Le Labo’s newest flagship store, reflecting and reinforcing the brand’s ethos and purpose.
A reverence for handmade processes and the wonder that can be found in subtle, evanescent details are intrinsic to the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi; a guiding principle for Le Labo and a mindset that informed the meticulous renovation of a wooden townhouse (machiya) as a flagship brand environment. Formerly a family-owned sake brewery stretching back three generations, the history of the building has been revered and exposed, celebrating the detail and nuance of Japanese craft. With scent as a primary sensory theme, the brand layer visual, tactile, and olfactory cues to inform a deeply emotional and cultural experience. The space is a fully realised evocation of place, time, and emotion that connects centuries-old machiya architecture with Le Labo’s raw, minimalist aesthetic.
[Image Credit: Le Labo]
How to apply this thinking
Sight, sound, touch, scent, taste. When you design for the senses, you unlock emotion. When you unlock emotion, you engineer connection. The right sensorial and experiential moments can turn passive browsers into active brand believers.
Want to know how this approach is reshaping how we interact with retail, and why sensorial design as a facet of brand world building is on the rise?