LOEWE x Howl’s Moving Castle // In-Store Experience

LOEWE is a Spanish luxury fashion brand who have previously collaborated with Ghibli, a renown Japanese Animation Studio with movies like ‘Princess Mononoke’. Their previous campaigns tied into ‘My Neighbour Totoro’ and ‘Spirited Away’, and the latest launch centred around the experience with ‘Howl’s Moving Castle’ characters.

In association with Stink Studios, UX Connections provided UX services that supported LOEWE’s vision of creating a character-finding experience, that would bring together their fashion pieces with characters and settings from Howl’s Moving Castle.

As we joined the project, the story and game concepts for each chapter of the mobile experience had been defined by the creative team at Stink Studios. However, these chapters lacked connection. They needed help to join everything together to form a cohesive user experience.

Our consultant broke down each chapter into different states and steps, to better understand the requirements for copy, animations and art assets. We also defined the navigation and menu items needed to ensure that the user could follow the experience with ease.

The campaign included two experiences – one was a more traditional website product launch, and the other a QR code mobile experience that was promoted in-store. This mobile experience consisted of several mini games. Decisions made in each of these games led to a final character reveal from the movie that matched users’ personalities and decisions the most.

The website experience, which was called a ‘take-over’, included new visual assets that blended Loewe.com and Studio Ghibli visuals. These incorporated an illustrated mouse cursor, landscape movie scenes placed around the website, and various other transitions and micro-animations.