Designing a luxury retailer's digital foundation with wayfinding for a seamless omnichannel experience.

Background

Printemps is a historic French department store with over 160 years of luxury heritage, renowned for its elegance and high-end offerings. Founded in Paris, Printemps has long been a symbol of refined French style, offering a curated selection of fashion, beauty, home, and lifestyle products. With its rich legacy, Printemps has evolved into a global brand, combining its heritage with modern innovations to provide a unique and elevated shopping experience for discerning customers.

The Challenge

Entering the competitive U.S. luxury retail market required Printemps to completely reimagine its digital infrastructure. The 160-year-old French department store faced the complex challenge of preserving its rich Parisian heritage while creating a technology-enabled experience that would resonate with American consumers.

Traditional retail systems were no longer sufficient; the brand needed a unified omnichannel approach that could seamlessly connect their website's backend infrastructure with in-store experiences across their 55,000-square-foot New York flagship.

The Ambition

Printemps aimed to create more than just another e-commerce platform or physical store. The vision was to develop an integrated ecosystem where digital and physical retail environments would enhance each other, creating a cohesive luxury journey regardless of how customers engaged with the brand.

This required rethinking each component from the technical architecture to wayfinding systems, establishing a foundation that would support the brand's long-term expansion in the American market while setting new standards for luxury retail innovation.

The Solution

A comprehensive digital foundation built from the ground up that seamlessly connects online and in-store experiences. The platform integrates sophisticated e-commerce functionality with interactive in-store wayfinding systems, creating a unified customer journey across all touchpoints. By implementing The Alliance methodology, the design team ensured deep collaboration throughout development, resulting in a solution that balances luxury aesthetics with digital innovation.

Reimagining retail as a Parisian apartment

Beyond shopping, the store offers lifestyle services that blur the line between retail and residential living:

• Spa sanctuary with treatment booking platform and digital relaxation guides
• Atelier & Repairs station featuring appointment scheduling and status tracking
• Wine Shop with digital sommelier recommendations and inventory access
• Sneaker Room with interactive product displays and limited-edition release alerts

The residential-inspired specialty areas each received custom digital treatments:

• Playroom with gamified shopping experiences for younger visitors
• The Boudoir featuring personalized styling recommendations
• Salon spaces with digital product showcases and consultant scheduling

The platform's architecture enables visitors to seamlessly navigate these diverse experiences through intuitive interfaces. Users can explore searchable galleries of merchandise, create personal collections, and even schedule in-store consultations with specialized staff—all through a unified digital ecosystem that maintains the residential feeling of moving through an elegant Parisian home rather than a conventional department store.

Reimagining retail as a Parisian apartment

Printemps New York transcends traditional department store conventions by reimagining the retail space as a sophisticated Parisian apartment. This conceptual approach required specialized digital experiences for each unique area:

The culinary program, directed by acclaimed Chef Gregory Gourdet, features multiple distinct dining experiences—each requiring its own digital presence within the unified platform:

• Fine dining restaurant with online reservation system and dynamic menu displays
• Casual café with mobile ordering capabilities integrated into the wayfinding system
• Parisian-inspired raw bar with real-time inventory management
• Cocktail bar featuring digital menu boards and event promotion

Mixed Reality & Spatial Computing Solution

With the physical store still under construction during the critical design phase, our team developed a proprietary solution using Apple Vision Pro technology to revolutionize the digital signage and wayfinding design process. This innovative approach allowed us to:

• Create virtual spatial prototypes of where the screens would live in the 55,000-square-foot retail environment
• Test and optimize digital screen placements, viewing angles, and orientation within the virtual space
• Evaluate screen sizing and content legibility from various customer vantage points
• Present immersive previews of the complete digital ecosystem to stakeholders before implementation