Sweet smell of success: The Future Laboratory wins RetailWeek Interiors Awards 2014

The annual awards, which this year took place at Park Lane’s Hilton Hotel, celebrate the best and brightest in the world of retail, with a particular focus on concept and design.

The Future Laboratory, along with Selfridges and design studio Campaign, collected the awards for Best POP/VM Solution of the Year and the big one, the ISG UK Retail Interior of the Year award, for the best overall interior around the UK.

‘I’m delighted that our vision of future retail, Fragrance Lab, created with Campaign for the Selfridges Beauty Project, has done so well at this year’s RetailWeek Interiors Awards,’ The Future Laboratory co-founder Chris Sanderson tells LS:N Global. ‘To win for best pop-up and then to scoop the top award for Retail Interior of the Year is a real measure of The Future Laboratory’s creative vision and talent. Selfridges was a fantastic client to work with on this project and we loved the challenge it set us of making the future of retail come to life for its customers.’

Speaking to LS:N Global, Carlotta Jacoby, senior visual projects manager at Selfridges, said: ‘It was great to be recognised on a collaborative project that pushed the boundaries from a retail interior design perspective and shopping experience. Creating our own fragrance brand for the project was an exciting challenge that paid off.’

The Fragrance Lab was an experiment to uncover the future of retail, offering a vision of how retailers can engage consumers in the age of online shopping. Visitors were guided through an immersive sensory journey that began with asking them to select from a number of images and statements, enabling the Fragrance Lab to capture a profile and determine which scent best captured their personality.

The concept was inspired by observing the limitations of traditional shops, and offered a compelling alternative. ‘It’s inspiring for the leaders of the retail industry to recognise an original idea that is the Fragrance Lab,’ Philip Handford, creative director at Campaign, tells LS:N Global. ‘This was a project that brought a new approach to a UK industry that is in a state of stagnation and will inspire us all here at Campaign to keep on it.’

For more on the shifts in consumer culture that are causing a host of new retail trends, see our Retail Futures Webinar. To order The Future Laboratory’s Consumer Futures Report 2015, email Alena Joyette at [email protected].