International Duty Free
Lagardere Travel Retail Belgium

Historical travel retail leader in Belgium and second oldest duty-free operator in the world, Lagardère Travel Retail Belgium, was at the origin of the first Duty-Free boutiques of Brussels Zaventem and Brussels-South Charleroi airports and is also present in Brussels South train station.

Services

User Experience Design
Visual Design
Web Design

Context

Startup - Scale Up
8 months
02/2019 - 10/2019

Create room for a luxary experience
In a fast user journey

Challenges

What if you could plan ahead of your trip your purchase in a dutty free and have the items ready when you are in the airport? Or when you land back home after your holliday?

As a concept, dutty free is at the confluence of many luxury branding with some special tax regulation. What a cocktail to mix in an online e-shop!

In this project I had multiple aspects to take into consideration:

Create a consistent online shopping experience (web, mobile, kiosk) with a very wide range of products and categories;
Incorporate the specificities of a dutty free e-commerce like double pricing or specific purchase flows;
Provide a very premium esthetic and customer experience;

Approach

I decided to embrace the beautiful material the fashion industry provides to offer a contrast between brand appeal and product display. Combining that with a dark and light pattern throughout the e-shop makes the products stand out. The navigation is shared between Zara’s alike menu and categories cards to ease the flow from one side to the other.

By providing first a set of wireframes and UI intent (demo of one webpage) I was quickly able to get feedback and then approval from all the stakeholders (Lagadère, Airports, Brands). I then move on the do the proper design of the overall website.

I worked closely with the development team to ensure accurate execution from start to finish.

It results in a highly graphical e-shop still praised by travellers today. The very selective brand Dior has approved this e-shop as one of few allowed to resell it’s products!

Evolve the brand language

The branding material given by the client was very scarce. With only a logo and a set of colours - black & white & a navy blue - no typography and just a simple presentation website, almost no branding direction were given.

The blue used in the logo being too vibrant and connoted, I search for a new colour. I used a tone skin colour and vibrant black & white contrast to stay true to the brand attributes while bringing a more human touch. I set out to one well-balanced serif typography, Lora, for the heading while remaining more generic for the body font with the default os font.