NYC - Perfume Lab

New York has always been on my list of bucket list destinations, the city buzz and beautiful surroundings always intrigued me - along with the shopping of course. I have just been lucky enough to get back from this city with my University course. And all I can say is it exceeded my expectations by thousands, the pictures I had seen where nothing compared to walking through the city in reality. It was safe to say when we landed we were all in awe and couldn't contain the excitement. So for our first day, we went to visit a partnering university called The Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) to go and talk about fragrances with one of their teachers. I found this fascinating, so far we haven't looked into perfumes so to be told about it by such an prestigious course and to sit in the professional labs they have set up in the lab was amazing. We got talked through all the accents, tiers, marketing and packaging of perfumes and all the work that goes into them. To me, the thing that most surprised me was when they said that in a brief for a perfumer, the brand has to give other perfumes they want it to smell similar to. Before this talk I would have assumed that brands would just specify the kind of scent to be original and different than other fragrances on the market.

In the evening of our first day we decided to do a bit of exploring to some of the iconic destinations in the city - starting out with Times Square of course. I don't think there is anyway to prepare you for this experience, walking through it was just so lively and you never knew where to look in the best way. All the billboards, shops and lights send your senses into overdrive as you stand in amazement at the sheer scale of this location. One thing I noticed is in this setting brands really have to make their billboards standout from the norm - grab the public attention before they turn away to look at the next billboard of a thousand. Now from looking round here, it helped me brainstorm some ideas for a digital outcome for my current project. One idea being billboards - possibly making them interactive by placing them in shops somehow, placing them on the floor of Times Square or mixing them with QR codes. Shopping through a billboard and collecting it from the shop below?