BRAND COMPONENTRY | LINKING BRAND DESIGN VOCABULARIES, PATTERNING[S], PREMISES AND PRINCIPLES

Designing for perfume—the detailing of scent-related *experientiality: D I P T Y P Q U E.

When I see things, invariably I smell them. When I touch things, I hear them. It’s a trait of curiosity—it’s one thing to see things, it’s another to touch them, still another to taste them, or hear them. And smell them. But then again—they, while disparate, could be one to each, altogether to another. Separate, or connected.

The obvious jump is anatomical sensory bridge between scent and taste—since the scent of flavor is intrinsically tied to the holism of inhaled flavor experience, they’re intertwined. But imagining the color of scent is another journey, and linking sound to fragrance, still another. And yet, perhaps most relevantly, as designers and brand thought participants, we need to be thinking aoub the intermingling of multiple sensations in a kind of synaesthetic interlayering. Any brand is about a place and a story, and any brand—in the fire of its making, and all of the outreaches to community and human interconnectivity, it’s a sphere of holistic expression—every threading leads back to the heart.

Girvin @ Bend, OR | Tech Conference: WEBcam

The heated steam of insights: the voice of fragrance, the touch of sound, the scent of sight..
MIngled, they are mighty—and in the deep brain of brand experience, they play to potent memories.

And in our quest as brand workers, we’re looking for
the creation of memorable work—brands that are unforgettable,

Sure, like a kid, I pick things up to see what they smell like. But, too—perhaps like you—I think of a color, a texture, perhaps a combination of imagery and color, its textural character and and it vibrates with the imagination of fragrance. The smell of color, and the sight of perfume. Or the sound of it—
“that perfume sounds like…”

To every product, there is a story, to every story, there is a telling—and in every telling, there is a person that offers that tale. In this sequence of blogs, the notations have been about the nature of the selling of scent in a “place.” As I’ve noted, the idea of perfume in space is a complex and delicate affair. The challenge, of course, is that scent is an entirely personal notation [love it, hate it, ignore it] and the idea of an environment that might be suffused in fragrance is a serious, dislocating, a gross impingement for many.

The nature of these elements, whether shopfront, manufacturing and craft space, materials lab or high end sophisticated and salon-like environments—each of these can frame that quality. Story comes out—as an experiential threading; it’s a brand patterning. We’ve written about the dynamics of scent in place—scent design and mnemonic context –ranging from the spiritual to the specially retail, retold. Others comment, Chandler Burr, for example. There are the principles of delicacy and restraint, or the emboldened super spritz of retail. Or toxic.

We think of these perfumed premises as brand principles.

• There is the brand, the passionate fire—and its story.
• There is the nature and complexity of the perfumes, their vaporous nature [how do you manage it?]—what are they “saying,” what is the character of their “notation.”
• There is the spirit of the brand expression and their relationship to the founding visioning who created the scent, art directed their making, to those characteristics, what design language might emerge?

Perfume designer Pierre Dinand | Tim Girvin, TokyoBeauty.

• There is scale, light, materials, “volume,” spatial planning.

To each, their own story.

In studying the range of scent spaces—places for selling fragrance—and working on designing for them, there should be a link between the brand, the story, and how that place could be envisioned.

Here’s a reference: Diptyque is a brand with a story, a kind of charming brand storytelling—and the designer of their most recent outpost, in London—Christopher Jenner‘s newest offering, which is described, by Mr. Jenner, as a kind of experiential storytelling.

His sense of brand coding and detailing is complex—
and infused in the layering of Diptyque’s labeling styling—
a kind of vertically rectangular elliptical rendering.

Radiused rectangles

And the patterning at the shopfront.

Interestingly, the design of an environment for the sale of scents

LELABO | NYC

is often better suited to the layering of story—
an expression that will be richly sensate—
not unlike the packaging that contains the perfume.

ÆDES DE VENUSTAS | NYC

And, the legends holds sway, in the making of place.

TIM | QUEEN ANNE STUDIOS | GIRVIN
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*Experientiality: “The Strategy of Holism | Emotionality
and Design Engineering.” World of Work
EXPERIENCE DESIGN STRATEGIES | BRAND, STORY & SCENT