Creating a Digital Experience for Debenhams

Goal: The Debenhams retail brand closed all of their store premises in 2021. Bought by the boohoo group, Debenhams is now a predominantly online brand but a bricks and mortar location was required to give customers an essential brand touchpoint. The Debenhams.com Beauty store needed to reflect the dynamic, digital-first nature of the Debenhams brand and the boohoo group while providing customers a uniquely in-store experience.

Challenge: The Debenhams Beauty Bar needed to be a digital-forward environment that showcased the variety of products available in store and online. The variety of digital signage set to be employed in the store and the different content required to be shown across those screens, meant that any technology employed had to be reliable and robust enough to handle the brand requirements both now and in the future as more points of interaction may be added.

Following on from their award-winning installation for the boohoo corporate offices, inurface media looked to make the Debenhams.com Beauty Store as digital an experience as possible. Installing a mix of bulkheads, palladium and interactive experience screens, inurface needed the help of Scala, to provide a high quality content management system. As the screens display a mix of content across the store, and for different concession brands utilizing the Scala CMS meant that Debenhams and inurface could create a mix of playlists that could be regularly updated to display the latest product and campaigns.

Above the display stands on either side of the store, a series of digital palladium screens advertise the beauty brands and products held below. Curved LED screens at the back of the store offered an additional opportunity for brands to have their products highlighted in store.

A digital signage solution that required a high volume of content, the installation required a robust and reliable content management system (CMS). Scala media players and CMS were trusted to schedule and play the impressive roster of content, many of which is provided directly from the beauty brands available in store.

The digital signage solution created for Debenhams Beauty Bar creates a digital-forward environment for the brand while giving customers a physical location to browse and discover products.

Incorporating digital signage at different scales and in different locations across the store, the Debenhams.com Beauty Store can promote products to customers at different points of their journey in store. The large scale, bulkhead signage entices customers in store while the in-store digital signage can direct customers towards specific products. These screens and retail signage strategy also offer Debenhams.com and an opportunity to generate promotional income as brands advertise new launches or priority products on the installed screens.

The social wall, devised by inurface sister company, Xi, offered a unique way for customers to interact with the Debenhams brand. Users can snap selfies using or displaying their newly purchased products on social media with #debenhamsbeauty for a chance to be featured on the wall, boosting customer brand interaction.