SK-II Smart Store
Brief
In 2018 I left Spotify to enjoy the life at one of New York’s most prestigious Creative Agencies, Huge.
My first project was joining the SK-II client team as a QA Lead, heading Huge’s first foray into interactive “phygital” experiences. The experience we created was a smart store, that could connect to your WeChat account, greet you by name, analyze your skin, present the data and then make product recommendations based on that data. The first deployment of this experience in China happened in Shanghai Q3 2018.
My Role
I was excited to take my QA skills into the physical realm, deploying them in a completely new context, with new challenges and new learnings. The “moments” in the store that the user enjoyed were developed as React webapps and were familiar territory, but the physical integration of the moments, from lighting to network infrastructure and security was a completely new to me. I had a holistic responsibility of the quality of the whole store, from how the very first touch point on WeChat, to the user leaving the store, hopefully with some SK-II skincare products.
Complication
The experience had to feel magical, and to pull that off we leveraged a lot of different tech, including ceiling mounted depth sensing cameras to sense when a user approached the station. As the user approached the station we deployed another set of cameras to recognize the users face, as captured while their skin was scanned earlier in the experience. This allowed us to greet the user by name as they approached, making for a friendly and magical experience.
Working out of China was also a challenge in itself with linguistic and cultural barriers, but also very tangible barriers around security and the “great firewall of China”.
Resolution
The store was opened on time in the prestigious K11 mall in downtown Shanghai. Lines started forming almost immediately after with the buzz generated from SK-II on social media and WeChat. Thanks for thorough risk management and testing the store was able to stay opened and fully functional without major issues throughout its deployment period of three months.
Media & Accolades
