Ethnographic vanity room

Last week saw a double bill of beauty at The Future Laboratory head office on Elder Street in London, with our annual Beauty Forum running across two consecutive days. The great and good of the global industry descended on Shoreditch, with representatives from companies such as L’Oréal, Aesop, Boots and Estée Lauder in attendance.

As well as a Trend Safari on local retail, guests were greeted with a specially formulated menu of optimised food and drink, and an interactive installation giving insights into key consumer habits. This Ethnographic Vanity Room showcased interviews with five key demographics and was accompanied by select products.

‘We took quantitative research as a foundation upon which to conduct qualitative research, in the form of films interviewing consumers at home,’ explained Joanna Tulej, art director at The Future Laboratory. ‘Delegates could look at the curation of products aimed at each demographic while listening to first-hand interviews of beauty early adopters talking about what they did and didn’t like about these products, and retail environments in general.’

‘We customised existing tubular steel structures, adding CNC-routed birch tabletops with made-to-measure recesses for each of the products,’ said Lynne Devine, design lead on the project. ‘Smoked glass mirrors encouraged viewers to look at the products through the lens of each consumer group.’

The videos will be remastered as a special Tribes feature, to be shown on LS:N Global over the coming weeks.

The Big Picture: The beauty industry is being transformed by trends including The Convergence Economy and The Optimised Self. Knowing your consumer is more important than ever before.