Two windows, two winters, one idea. The first built a Provencal village out of the ingredients inside L'Occitane's own products. The second was pressed from nearly a quarter of a tonne of waste plastic. Both on Regent Street, both made in our own workshop.
L'Occitane · Regent Street; Covent Garden · London, UK · 2020-2021 · Luxury and beauty · Design; Production; Project Management
A beauty brand that talks about sourcing has a problem at Christmas. The windows are the most seen thing it makes all year, and they are almost always the least defensible: printed vinyl, foamed plastic, a six-week life and a skip at the end.
L'Occitane wanted the opposite. The Christmas 2020 windows had to carry the brand's Sustainable Sourcing programme rather than sit awkwardly beside it, on two of the most looked-at retail frontages in London.
We built the windows out of the brand's own supply chain.
The Provençal village, the hillsides, the hot air balloons and the clouds were made from L'Occitane's key ingredients and other responsibly sourced natural materials: dried botanicals, seeds, grains and moss, laid by hand into mosaic. Lavender for the fields. Immortelle in the baubles. The theme was “Gift the magic of Provence, from our fields to your home”, and the materials were the argument.
Everything was fabricated in our own UK workshop, which runs waste-free on renewable energy, and installed at Regent Street and Covent Garden. A card in the Regent Street window explained it to the street: “This window celebrates our ongoing commitment to respecting biodiversity. The display has been created using our key ingredients and responsibly sourced, low impact materials.”
L'Occitane came back in June 2021 for the Eco-Refill window at the Regent Street flagship, promoting refills over new bottles.
The brief pointed in a different direction to the botanicals, so the material did too. That window was built from waste plastic: collected, shredded, pressed into boards, laser-cut and finished with colour-matched water-based paints. L'Occitane's own account puts it at nearly a quarter of a tonne of plastic, kept out of waste and turned into a shopfront.
Christmas 2020: L'Occitane key ingredients, dried botanicals, seeds, grains, moss and responsibly sourced natural materials. 2021: post-consumer waste plastic, shredded and pressed into sheet, laser-cut, finished in water-based paints. Both fabricated in Pie Factory's own UK workshop, waste-free and renewably powered. Mapped to UN Sustainable Development Goals 12 and 15.
Neither window was carbon measured, so no footprint is claimed here. The quarter-tonne plastic figure is L'Occitane's own published figure for the 2021 Eco-Refill window, not a Pie Factory measurement.
The 2020 windows led directly to the 2021 commission. L'Occitane published the second window's story themselves, which makes it one of the few numbers on this site verifiable without going through us.
“Sustainable, responsible, beautiful and engaging; thank you Pie Factory.” Alia Sirina Hawa, L'Occitane Group.