History and Machine Learning Fuel Inspiration at Le Visionnaire

• Finalist 2024 

In 1938, L’Oréal opened its headquarters on 14 rue Royale in Paris. Almost a century later, the world’s leading beauty manufacturer reimagined the space as a venue for employees from across the world to come together, find inspiration within the company’s heritage, and collaboratively envision its future. The design team was tasked with developing a visitor experience that enhanced L’Oréal’s internal creative capabilities, giving each employee unprecedented access to the company’s history, contemporary trends, and customer insights.

Agency

Local Projects

Practice Area

• Branded Environments 

Client

L’Oréal

Industry

• Workplace 

L’Oréal Groupe project leaders encouraged us to embrace the contrast between heritage and modernity in the new space. We also took cues from architect Alain Moatti’s integration of an elegant egg-shaped glass structure into the original building’s classical architecture, blending historic and futuristic to create a place dedicated to innovation and ‘savoir faire’ transmission. We wanted to help L’Oréal’s creative teams embrace that same spirit while forging a deeper connection between each individual and their sources of inspiration.

Three interactive experiences spanning multiple floors, bring employees together in physical spaces and serve as tools to catalyze the creative process.

Within the heritage space, La Route, visitors explore 25 individual niches, a mosaic of illuminated drawers and cabinets that showcase objects reflecting the rich history and evolution of L’Oréal, including the blond hair dye packages used in the first women’s hairdressing schools, housed inside 14 Rue Royale itself, as well as the evolution of sunscreen and other innovative technologies developed by L’Oréal. Each story can be saved to a visitor’s personal collection for later reference and inspiration.

In the brands’ space, Les Marques, offers a multi-sensory look at L’Oréal Groupe’s portfolio of brands. The walls of the room feature an array of iconic products spanning six categories – haircare, hair color, fragrance, makeup, skincare, and body care – that surround visitors. L’Oréal brand ambassadors can also create custom shows, immersing visitors in a brand or a category in an exclusive subterranean vault. Video, audio, and images that capture a brand’s essence activate along the wall and on the ceiling in an immersive space that supports facilitators’ presentations.

Finally, inside the central room of the glass structure, they arrive the Visionary Wall. Visitors create personalized moodboards from a cascade of live images. Machine learning is used to curate millions of live images and sort them based on color composition and semantic contents like shapes, patterns, and architectural features. Each addition to a collection conjures up new, relevant images that inspire users to make meaningful connections in real-time.

All visitors activity within Le Visionnaire can be saved to a visitor’s unique ID, leveraging the existing system that gives L’Oréal Groupe employees access to the building. Visitors don’t have to register for a new app or create a new user profile to collect content in the space, making the collection process seamless and intuitive. They can collect stories across the heritage space or save a moodboard from the insight wall, all of which can be emailed to them, or accessed across mobile and desktop devices.