The Heritage Room – Carry on our legacy
NIVEA, Hansaplast, Eucerin, tesa, Labello and La Prairie have one thing in common. They all belong to Beiersdorf, founded over 140 years ago in Hamburg. In the new corporate headquarters, which will open in 2023, the Heritage Room presents the treasures of the company archive for the first time and brings their significance for the future of the company to life.
The idea
Together with the Beiersdorf Heritage Team, SIMPLE has created an aesthetic and functional space that creates emotional access in digital and analogue under the narrative motif “Where moments meet”. This motif is based on a simple finding: the coming together of people, ideas and things at the right moment has produced great and ground-breaking things at Beiersdorf. These magic moments are reflected in the storyline from the greeting to the farewell gesture.
This encounter at the pharmacy counter with a transparent screen blurs the boundaries between past and present. Five characters invite visitors to get to know all the founding personalities. To put them in relation to each other, two of the characters can be combined with each other. The short animated stories tell the magic moment that was created by the meeting or relationship of these two people and that still characterises the company today.
The stories are brought to life by the combination of the abstracted historical scenes and the drawn characters by illustrator Gregory Gilbert-Lodge. The latter are already familiar to many employees and visitors from the archive’s Chronicles. They are highly recognisable, which strengthens the perception of historical corporate communication.
Users can access the 150 or so stories via six physical markers, the topic tokens Brands, Responsibility, People, Value & Strategy, Research & Development and Supply Chain. As with PEOPLE, a Magic Moment can be triggered by combining two tokens.
With its variety of content, playful access and content updates, the exhibit invites employees at the site in particular to return. The user experience with simple rotating and scrolling interactions is intuitive. As with all exhibits, it is supported by feedback sounds, all of which were produced with Beiersdorf products in analogue form and further processed digitally.
The PICTURES station offers an exciting haptic experience with a digital link to the company’s historical database. Thousands of image and film documents can be viewed here and can be filtered using the category tokens year, country, brand, colour and medium. The navigation token offers the possibility to zoom and scroll through films, photos and adverts from more than 140 years of company history from Australia to Zambia.
The TIME timeline provides a quick overview of the most important events and developments. The important tool for short visits and the onboarding of new Beiersdorflers impresses with its almost sculptural appearance as well as its lightness and transparency.
Every brand experience needs a place for changing content, for customised thematic mini-exhibitions. The FOCUS large display case is equipped with modular presentation elements for this purpose. The two Beiersdorf archivists Thorsten Finke and Daniel Wallburg present their favourite objects and the exciting stories behind them in “idle fashion”.
The Chronicles published annually by the archive, the company history in magazine format to take away, can be found at STORIES. All issues are available here in English and German and the places for the next issues are already planned.
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