Selfridges

Project management

Transforming Selfridges W1 Beauty Hall was a complex, multi-phase project involving the sourcing and implementation of multiple technology solutions that would transform the hall into a modern retail space whilst also remaining sympathetic to its 115-year old listed building surroundings. 

 

Alongside the client, 38 beauty brands and other third party suppliers were closely collaborated with to ensure consistency, quality, cost efficiency, and minimal disruption to customers throughout the process. Alongside the main Beauty Hall project, we implemented 171 separate service projects for the beauty brands between June 2023 and the Hall’s relaunch in March 2024.

 

The Beauty Hall had to remain operational throughout, so each phase involved meticulous planning and coordination to ensure that the digital experience was seamlessly integrated across the store, despite the challenging, legacy built-environment.

 

A fully functioning trial concession unit was installed at Selfridges’ head office to gather feedback from all stakeholders, ensuring the final design for each type of digital unit was meticulously refined, before being offered to the beauty brand partners.

 

Design

Beauty hall environments can be visually overwhelming, with beauty brands competing for attention. By designing, building and installing large perimeter digital totems with mitred corners, we provided high impact and unique digital canvases to the multiple brands hosted by Selfridges, without overwhelming the customer.

 

The unique custom digital component design provides long-term flexibility, accommodating  brand moves - the digital totems, video walls and mid-floor displays can remain in place and simply be re-skinned to match the new aesthetic. 

One of the most unique challenges was the store's sloped flooring, which varied by up to 600mm across different sections of the hall. To ensure perfect alignment, the bespoke solution totems were designed to be free-standing with an adjustable frame, allowing for millimetre-accurate alignment of the digital displays to maintain a consistent visual experience.

 

Materials

A total of 142 square metres of protected LED digital display was installed across the Beauty Hall, each unit equipped with automatic failover redundant systems to minimise downtime. 

 

Accurate construction and flexible installation were key criteria for this project so the free-standing supporting frames were built from a mixture of aluminium and laser-cut steel, and LED modules with transparent protective glue coating for high degree of impact resistance.

Visual content is supported by weighted sub-playlists (media items that can be categorised to determine how often each one gets played) and network triggered items (a system where certain content is played following a trigger in the digital network). This allows Selfridges to easily adjust content to provide a more personal, immersive shopping experience for different customer audiences.