Love Night: branding a room with the lights off
Absolut took over a venue for one night in May. We built the neon, the prize booth, the Love Salon and everything in between. Here is what changes when you brand a room nobody can see properly.
One night, one room, no daylight
Absolut booked a venue in May and turned it into Love Night. Our job was everything with the brand on it: the neon, the installations, the prize booth, the salon, the drinkware. The kind of work that looks effortless in the photographs and is nothing of the sort in the workshop.
Nightclub branding is a different discipline from retail, and the difference is light. In a supermarket you fight for attention against fluorescent ceilings and a hundred other packs. In a club there is almost no ambient light at all, so anything that does not glow simply does not exist. Every element has to carry its own light source, and that decision has to be made in the drawing, not after the thing is built.
The Absolut Icon booth
The centrepiece was an arched vitrine outlined in neon, filled with soft toys, built as a prize machine. It borrows the language of an arcade or a fairground booth, which is exactly right for a night about play, and it gives people something to do rather than something to look at.
Arches recur through the whole build. It is a shape that reads as a doorway, a stage and a frame all at once, and in a dark venue an illuminated arch is the most legible object you can put in a room.
Love Salon
A wall of wigs under a neon Love Salon sign, set up as a transformation station. This is where the night moved from decoration into participation, because a visitor does not photograph a wig wall, they wear something from it and photograph themselves.
For a brand whose whole platform is self-expression, a station where people physically become someone else for an hour is a better argument than any headline on a panel.
Only Fans
A neon sign reading Only Fans above a bank of actual fans. The joke lands in about a second and a half, which is roughly all the attention any single element gets on a busy night.
Not every piece needs to be architecture. Sometimes the brief is one good line, executed cleanly, positioned where people queue.
The things people hold
Branded cups, ice buckets, straws. Easy to overlook and probably the hardest working items in the whole build, because they are the only branded objects that travel around the room all night and end up in every photograph anyone takes.
An installation gets photographed by the people who walk past it. A cup gets photographed by the person holding it, at arm's length, with their friends in the frame. Different reach entirely.
What a night like this actually takes
Every piece was built in the workshop, transported, installed in a venue that was operating up until the moment we started, and had to be finished before doors. There is no soft opening for an event. It works at nine o'clock or it does not work.
That is the part of this business nobody photographs, and it is the part that decides whether any of it happens.
