Eau de Toi
Discover Your Scent Personality｜An immersive, multisensory booth that guides shoppers from decision paralysis to confident fragrance choices.
- Silver·Interaction Design
- Silver·UX & Navigation
- Bronze·Interactive Design
The Challenge
Fragrance shoppers often face decision paralysis in retail stores, overwhelmed by countless options, complex note descriptions, and unfamiliar brands. Current experiences rarely tap into visuals, sound, or mood, leading to missing sensory cues. As a result, customers experience longer browsing times, lower purchase confidence, and frequently abandon their shopping journeys.
The Approach
To solve this, we employed a highly iterative prototyping process to test the desirability, usability, and feasibility of a tech-aided recommendation system. We utilized diverse methods, including Desktop Walkthroughs to map store movement, Service Advertisements to test value propositions, and Cardboard/Paper Prototyping to simulate booth interactions and post-purchase touchpoints.
The Outcome
We created Eau de Toi, a guided, multisensory fragrance experience that helps casual shoppers discover who they are and what they want to wear. The result is a seamless, confidence-building experience that makes fragrance shopping inspiring, memorable, and deeply personal.
THE PROBLEM LANDSCAPE
The paradox of choice in fragrance shopping. The “moment of truth” for a customer arrives when they must choose a fragrance without fully understanding what suits them. Our research surfaced four interconnected pain points that cause this breakdown in the customer journey.
“I will only online shop at Zara because there aren’t 100 different choices that make me feel overwhelmed.”
Cognitive Overload
Paralyzed by excessive choices, complex terminology, and a lack of clear comparability.
Contextual Discovery
Shoppers connect with scents through experiential moments rather than static displays or online text.
The Articulation Gap
Consumers lack the specific olfactory vocabulary to accurately describe their tastes.
Missing Sensory Cues
Traditional retail formats fail to engage shoppers through visual, auditory, and emotional stimuli.
DISCOVER YOUR SCENT PERSONALITY
Eau de Toi acts as an immersive discovery booth that connects customers with scents they truly love. It accomplishes this through three core service features.
Personalized Scent Matching
Users match perfumes to their mood, preferences, and personality using a fast, intuitive quiz.
Immersive Discovery Experience
Shoppers discover scents in a multisensory booth equipped with ambient visuals, sounds, and immersive testing.
Scent Personality Profiling
Users receive a scent-based personality profile defined by keywords, moods, and style (e.g., “The Warm Idealist”).
FRONTSTAGE × BACKSTAGE
To ensure a flawless experience, we mapped the "Frontstage" (user touchpoints) and "Backstage" (system processes) across the entire shopping journey.
Awareness & Entry
A customer views a window display or scans a QR code (“I’m curious about the fragrance personality test”) and follows aisle signage to the booth.
Discovery
The user takes the recommendation quiz on the booth’s interactive screen. Backstage, the system processes the scent profile and mood mapping, routing recommendations to the booth and the sales associate’s terminal.
Decision & Purchase
The user samples recommendations, saves favorites to a wishlist, and proceeds to the checkout counter.
Post-Sale Engagement
The customer receives an automated email summary with their personality type, saved scents, and longevity / sillage details.
Prototyping & Testing
We rigorously tested our assumptions before finalizing the service, focusing on whether immersive elements and fewer options build user confidence.
Service Advertisement
We tested our value proposition via an entrance poster.
Findings.While the messaging successfully attracted interest, a single poster was insufficient; we must implement a network of in-store directional signage to successfully guide customers to the booth.
MACHINE LEARNING FEASIBILITY
To determine whether a tech-aided system could accurately support our service, we tested the viability of a Machine Learning backbone.
Predictive recommendations based on descriptive keywords.
Trained using the Fragrantica Dataset from Kaggle.
Evaluated via K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) and Naive Bayes to process variables like Gender and Main Accords.
BUSINESS VIABILITY
Is replacing retail shelf space with a digital booth worth the investment?
The Cost
Dedicating floor space to the booth removes 2.94% of displayed units, resulting in a marginal 0.29% drop in passive revenue.
The Return
An overwhelming majority of tested shoppers perceived the guided, multisensory experience as highly desirable and confidence-building. Because user confidence is so high, even a mere 1% increase in conversion through the booth entirely balances the lost shelf revenue. Anything beyond 1% is pure scalable profit.
Final Recommendations for Retailers
Placement
Place the booth outside the store to actively attract business, turning passing foot traffic into curiosity-driven visits.
Delivery Channel
Deliver samples through a technical solution, vending machines, sample machines, or embedded scent tiles, to improve user comfort.
Evolution
Develop “scent personality evolution” to explore how the system builds up user detail over time, post-experience personalization is essential for continued retention.
The Outcome
of testers perceived the service to be desirable, validating that guided discovery significantly enhances user confidence in a fragrance purchase decision.
“In a crowded retail environment, the key to driving conversion isn't offering more choices, it's offering clarity. Eau de Toi reimagines fragrance shopping as a moment of self-discovery, turning passive browsing into decisive, joyful purchases.”
Step in. Breathe in. Discover your scent personality.
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Skya
