Self Preserving

Self Preserving is a recent campaign from Lush which aims to promote its use of natural ingredients to help conserve products.

We were brought in as part of a collaboration to bring the campaign to life in store windows across Europe.

For the initial stages of the campaign, Lush commissioned the fantastic artist Charlotte Day to illustrate a series of flowers and natural ingredients that can be found in its products.

We then hand-crafted the illustrations into 3D paper structures, working directly from Charlotte’s hand-rendered designs, and used textured paper to give the final aesthetic an authentic, crafty finish.

The intricate displays were featured across a series of fifteen window displays throughout Europe. To create a special hero installation for its flagship London store on Oxford Street, we brought in 3D designer Thomas Forsyth. Thomas added a layer of movement to the display, creating a set of bespoke moving head mechanisms that he 3D printed using a biodegradable polymer and fitted with servo motors. These were then attached to the handcrafted stems and bases, and decorated with paper heads and foliage inspired by Charlotte Day's illustrations.

“Many hours were spent experimenting with different algorithms and code structures so that we could give the flowers more believable and animated movements, with less of a predictable and robotic feel,” explains Thomas. “We’ve actually ended up creating a program in which the flowers randomly generate their own movements, so when it feels like one of the flowers has turned to look at you, it kind of has.”

Alongside this flagship store installation we also created fifteen sets of large-scale paper flowers, which we mounted on wooden bases for support. These were then shipped out to Lush's key stores around Europe to be displayed in their windows. A detailed multi-layered papercut artwork was also created, featuring some of the key flowers from Charlotte Day's artwork. The illustrations was displayed on light boxes in all of Lush's 300 stores across Europe, as well as in their online and social media campaign.