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 36 different brands to come together and collaborate using the same shared tools and contexts.

We were 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. L'Oréal Groupe project leaders encouraged us to embrace the contrast between heritage and modernity and take cues from architect Alain Moatti’s integration of an elegant egg-shaped glass structure into the original building’s classical architecture.

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

The journey begins in La Route, a heritage space that contains a cabinet-of-wonder style display of L'Oréal’s archives, integrating interactive media with real products from across the decades. Within this heritage space, visitors can explore 25 individual niches, a mosaic of illuminated drawers and cabinets that showcase objects reflecting the rich history and evolution of L'Oréal. Fascinating stories and objects include 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.

Visitors explore tactile shelves and cabinets, revealing a selection of rich stories, each of which can be saved to a visitor’s personal collection for later reference.

In the brands’ space Les Marques, groups are invited to explore and collect inspiration before being treated to a branded multimedia show customized for different group needs. The walls of the room feature a multi-sensory look, including hidden projectors that take over the ceiling, hidden media that springs to life at the start of each show, and an array of iconic products spanning six categories - haircare, hair color, fragrance, makeup, skincare, and body care - that surround visitors. L’Oreal employees can customize media presentations for different groups featuring imagery and video from various products.

Finally, inside the central room of the glass structure, they arrive at Le Visionnaire. This is a technology-driven visioning space that jumpstarts creativity by making quick, intuitive connections between ideas and imagery. At 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.