Dior wanted people to connect to their end-of-year giftbox before it was ever in their hands.
The end-of-year box is one of the most considered objects Dior makes, and in the shopping weeks almost everyone meets it as a photograph. You look at it, you judge it, you scroll by. The object only gets to do its real work once people find their way to a store.
The Garden of Dreams was the campaign around it, with the key visuals, and the art direction led by GoSpooky. The question on the digital side was how to hand someone the box itself during the weeks they were choosing what to give.
Gifting is an emotional purchase. People are imagining a moment that has not happened yet, someone else opening something. So the goal was anticipation rather than information: put the box in the room, let it do something they did not expect, and let Dior’s story be experienced.
The Case
Dior – The Garden of Dreams
Our Process
We treat your challenge like our own, shape ideas into a clear experience strategy and craft every detail to create experiences that create lasting connection.
“Own”
We treat your challenge like our own, bringing expertise and perspective to make every idea stronger.
We think like owners, so we started with what the giftbox means to Dior. It is a seasonal object carrying a lot of brand weight, and anything we built around it had to hold up next to the real thing in someone's hands.
Our Perspective: Presence creates attachment
A product you can place in your own space stops being an image.
Once the box sits on someone's table, at its real size, in their own light, they have a version of the feeling that normally only arrives with the gift itself.
That closeness was the thing to create, and everything else in the experience exists to earn the time it takes to get that feeling.
Our Vision: An out-of-the-box experience
We wanted one object to be the source of everything, so the link between the gift and the Garden of Dreams world is something people watch happen rather than something they read. The box comes apart into glitter, and the campaign rises out of it. No menu, no home screen, one thing leading to the next.
Our expertise: One link, every phone, fourteen markets
A gift campaign runs for a few weeks in the busiest retail moment of the year, so the thing to solve was reach. Nothing to download, one link that works in every market, and the same story for someone on an older phone as for someone on a new one.
WebAR technology is extremely hard to master and produce at the scale of Dior. The product must hold up on basically everything considered a smart-phone.
“Shape”
We shape ideas into a clear experience strategy, built around your audience and your objectives.
The plan: Getting the sequence right
The order was settled early: place the box, watch it come apart, travel the maze, play the three scenes, arrive at the carousel. Placement comes first because that is the moment it becomes personal. The glitter comes second because it rewards the only bit of effort we ask of anyone.
Out of the storm rises the maze from the campaign key visuals, with three scenes inside it: a world where you light candles, a scene where you sculpt ice, and the horse carousel that starts turning with music once the journey is finished.
Each scene is short enough to finish while waiting for a train, and different enough that finishing one makes you curious about the next. The closing card sends people to Dior, back into the experience, or to a share.
Strategic choices
Real time rather than film. A film plays at you. A box standing on your own floor reacts to where you are and what you do, and that reaction is what turns interest into attachment.
The honest truth: nobody wants to download your app for a 3D experience. A single link travels through every channel and every market without problem. WebAR is extremely accessible and high-impact.
Three short scenes rather than one long one. Anything opened on a phone gets interrupted, and short scenes survive that.
“Craft”
Using experience strategy, design, motion and code; we craft every detail to create an experience that feels effortless and leaves a lasting impression.
Design
Art direction came from GoSpooky and the Garden of Dreams key visuals. Our part was turning that into a place people move through, which meant deciding how the maze reads from phone height, how far a scene can be played with while still looking unmistakably Dior, and where a small moment of glitter or sound keeps someone from standing still wondering what to do.
Motion
The signature move is ours: the box coming apart into glitter and glow, with the maze and the carousel rising out of it. Around that we added industry-challenging glitter, sound and haptic response, at every point where a person might hesitate. Yes, we really said that. Our client’s main feedback came down to: “But can we add more sparkles?”.
This motion experience is what makes a demanding scene immersive.
Code
The experience ran as real-time 3D in the mobile browser, with the box placed in the person's own space, so there was nothing to install and one link worked everywhere.
We built a performance system that reads the device it lands on and gives that device the richest version it can carry, then keeps adjusting while someone is playing. Particle counts and graphical detail move up and down in real time, so a six year old phone gets the same story at the same speed with support back to the iPhone 8+ from 2017.
WebAR projects tend to sometimes crash your browser out of nowhere, we fixed that.
A headless setup let Dior publish to more than 14 countries within minutes, with hosting scaling automatically and routing people to the nearest fast host through the campaign peak.
Each of the three scenes ran its own physics, with music composed for the experience.
Scope
Result
The experience gave the end-of-year campaign a dimension the film and the key visuals could not reach on their own. People had the box in their own room, in their own time, weeks before anyone held the real one, and they stayed with it long enough to finish the journey to the carousel.
It ran on a single link across more than 14 markets, and the WebAR community picked it up and passed it around.
"Creating beautiful things with a great attitude and impressive technical skills." Pieter Siekerman
The experience came down when the campaign ended. Our partnership with GoSpooky and Dior has kept growing since.
You need a link that opens straight into a camera view and an object that sits on a real surface at its real size. Three things decide whether it works: the object has to arrive before attention runs out, finding a surface has to be forgiving enough that a phone pointed at a carpet still works, and placing it should take one gesture. Scale is the detail that gets underestimated. An object rendered slightly too small reads as a toy and undoes the whole point of putting it there, so build it at measured dimensions and leave them alone. Dior's Garden of Dreams did this with the end-of-year gift box, which appeared at real size in the person's own space through the phone browser with nothing to download. It was built in 2023 by Amsterdam creative development studio Merlin with creative agency GoSpooky.
You measure the phone and adapt to it. The alternative is building for the weakest device and giving that version to everybody. A short check on load, a few quality levels, and a system that keeps watching performance and moves between those levels while the experience is running. What you protect is the story, and what you spend is the density. A scene with half the particles and the same composition, timing and sound reads as the same scene. A scene that stutters reads as broken, however good it looks in a screenshot. Garden of Dreams ran on a performance system Merlin built for it, which reads each device, adjusts graphics and particle load in real time, and keeps a heavy campaign experience playable on phones that are years old.
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