D’art Design Gruppe GmbH

After a consulting and construction phase of 18 months, D’art Design Gruppe has handed over the new Global Experience Center (GEC) for the area Laundry & Home Care to its new customer Henkel. On more than 700 square metres, the customer centre at the company’s headquarters in Düsseldorf offers a comprehensive overview of all the competences of this business area – from product innovation to digitisation and sustainability to Shopper Marketing.

“The Global Experience Center is the ideal platform to develop ideas for joint growth in an intensive exchange with our customers,” assures Bruno Piacenza, member of the board of management and responsible for the business area Laundry & Home Care, on the day of the inauguration in March 2015. D’art Design Gruppe convinced with its visionary concept and was able to gain Henkel as a new customer. In cooperation with an interdisciplinary Henkel project team - from Sales and Marketing to Research & Development - Dart could create an innovative centre that throws a daring glance into the future: customer wishes, product development and commercialization form a visionary triad. “Future and history fuse into an individual and sensorial experience consisting of architecture, scenography and language”, says Guide Mamczur happily, who oversaw the project as managing director of Dart.

The inspiring atmosphere and the intelligent space concept enable visitors to discover the various dimensions of Laundry & Home Care with all their senses. The “Experience Room” is already very impressive as the first station of the guided tour for visitors with its immersive fragrance cinema. Five perfume compositions effuse their scent into the space in synchrony with the images and in a space-filling manner; thus they create a very special cinema experience. This new fragrance projection was developed together with the Henkel Fragrance Center (HFC) especially for the B2B exhibition.

All stations of the centre are arranged interactively – be it by means of multimedia elements, the use of the so-called eye-tracking glasses or the possibility for visitors to create and test their own products.

But customers cannot only gain direct and close insights into Henkel’s business of washing and cleaning agents in the new centre: The objective is to intensify the joint cooperation in order to build long-term partnerships. On the basis of Henkel’s know-how on global trends and technologies as well as on the specific consumer and market demands in the different countries, the customers get comprehensive and individual advice from the Laundry & Home Care experts.