Custom holiday displays for Sephora Canada came down to one question: how do you make a gift box explode with nothing visibly holding it up? Then make it last two months in eight stores, even when shoppers sat on parts that were never meant to hold a person. Park Creative Studio designed it. shōmi! Custom fabricated it, about eleven weeks from brief to ready. Here’s the fabrication behind it, and what the retail floor taught us after opening night.
The Brief: Custom Holiday Displays for Sephora
The idea from Park Creative Studio was an “Only at Sephora” holiday pop-up: gifts wrapped in navy and light blue quilted velvet, tied with gold ribbons and bows, and gift boxes bursting open with oversized beauty icons (a lipstick, a compact, an ornament, a heart, a cream jar). Headers on every fixture read “Only at Sephora”.
The same look had to work in eight stores of very different sizes, so the kit flexed: 24 fixtures in all, made up of five gondolas, three freestanding gift boxes, six four-tier shelves and ten three-tier shelves. We were briefed on August 12, 2024. Everything was ready between October 28 and 30. That’s eleven weeks, which is plenty of time right up until you add quilted velvet.
The Hard Part: A Gift Box That Explodes
The rendering showed a box on the floor, its lid levitating above it and very large product replicas flying out, as if the box had just burst open. It’s a great picture. But a rendering has no gravity and no shoppers. The real brief wasn’t “build a box.” It was: hold everything in mid-air with nothing anyone can see.
We started with the obvious: hang the plush replicas. No hanging points allowed. Next we offered metal brackets from behind, hidden when you look straight on. Some would show from an angle, so that was a no too, and the same went for a bracket on the lid. That left clear acrylic: a clear acrylic tube up the centre, with acrylic rod arms branching out to hold each plush icon and the lid, kept as low-profile and invisible as acrylic gets. Acrylic disappears better than anything else we could use. It’s also the least forgiving. That trade-off comes back later.
We worked out how the oversized plush icons had to be built to sit on those arms, then commissioned our partner, a local plush artist, to make them. The finished box looks like it’s mid-explosion. Nothing you can see is holding it up.
The Build: Velvet, Quilted Like a Mattress
Velvet is soft and stretchy, which is another way of saying it’s hard to work with. The design called for long runs of it, channel-quilted over batting, and a regular sewing machine isn’t built for that. So we put it on the machine that is: a programmable multi-needle quilter, the kind mattress makers run, stitching rows of ribs in a single pass. Two layers of batting, a fabric backing, 3-inch ribs, dead straight over long runs. On an eleven-week timeline, that speed mattered.
The fabric maxed out at 60 inches wide, and that set the width of every panel. We cut each panel on the nearest rib line so no rib was ever split, joined the panels on a heavy-duty lockstitch machine, sewed in 2-inch Velcro, and kept each one slightly short, because velvet stretches down over time. Every panel kept the same nap direction so the colour reads evenly, because velvet will tell on you.
The columns at Bloor, Eaton Centre and Yorkdale were square, with each of the four faces clad separately, from about 10.5 feet tall at Yorkdale to about 12 feet at Bloor (3.2 to 3.7 metres). Each panel has a flap of peel-and-stick Velcro that grabs the next face on site, so the four faces wrap the column as one piece, and the cladding comes down again without damaging the store. Seams overlap by one rib and are sewn along the rib line, so they disappear into the channel. The other stores got printed vinyl on their columns, which is much less dramatic to write about.
Upholstery and the Gold
The upholstery. Every fixture got the velvet treatment: the cushion shelves, the cushion bases, the gift boxes, and the quilted back panels on the built-in gondolas, all in a 6-inch chevron quilt pattern. The velvet sits over half-inch foam on millwork, with broadcloth behind it to stabilize the stretch and carry the chevron layout. We sanded the millwork corners first so they wouldn’t wear through the fabric. We’ve upholstered enough fixtures to know velvet will find the one sharp edge you missed.
The gold. The ribbons and bows are steel and aluminum. The shelves are held by gold, ribbon-shaped frames with the shelf brackets built in, and topped with 40 metal bows in two styles (18 of one, 22 of the other). Add the headers and 78 steel shelf trays, and that’s a lot of gold to keep consistent. Aluminum ribbon strips, 96 inches long, were bent to wrap the gift box bases and the gondola bases. Before anything went to powder coat, we sprayed out eight metallic samples to match the gold, because gold turns out to be a whole family of colours.
Install, and What Shoppers Did to It
Everything shipped across Canada from our shop and went in overnight, installed by local partners in each market using store-by-store install guides we wrote. Crews of four to six people per store started at closing time and worked until it was done. Smaller stores were wrapped by 4 a.m. The larger ones ran until 8 a.m. Installs began on October 31, and we kept the displays maintained through January 8, 2025, which turned out to be useful.
Then shoppers arrived. They used the base of an exploding gift box as a seat and leaned back on the plush icons, and some of the acrylic rods cracked at three stores. Acrylic was the right call for staying invisible. It was never meant to be a backrest. We repaired them and sent spare parts to the sites. We also proposed clear acrylic shields and spare repair kits for the other stores. A retail floor will tell you exactly what looks like furniture.
Two more things needed solving on the fly. The gold ribbon on each velvet column had to wrap around on top of the velvet, so we designed custom brackets that went through the velvet and fastened to the wall, with standoffs to carry the powder-coated sheet metal ribbon. And days before a Sephora leadership visit on November 20, a column ribbon at Bloor got scuffed. We made a new one and installed it after-hours on November 19.
By the Numbers
Eight stores. 24 fixtures. About eleven weeks from brief to ready. About 115 yards of velvet (roughly 105 metres), 40 metal bows and 78 steel shelf trays. Delivered on time and on budget.
The Real Lesson
A wrapped gift is a simple idea. Keeping it wrapped, in eight stores, from the first overnight install through January, with shoppers leaning on it, is not. Park Creative Studio drew a gift box that explodes. Keeping it exploding took clear acrylic, spare parts and a crew that doesn’t mind working through the night. We build for January.
Planning a custom holiday build or a multi-store rollout, with something in the rendering that shouldn’t be able to stand up? That’s the kind of problem we like to work on. Talk to the shōmi! Custom team about your project.
Sephora Holiday 2024. Designed by Park Creative Studio. Fabricated by shōmi! Custom Photography by Robert Lowdon Photography.
