The question wasn’t how to build a cloud. It was how to build one that still looks clean after eight stores of foot traffic. Custom pop-up fabrication for Sephora’s Clean beauty pop-up meant building see-through clouds, a printed floor to match, product stands that light up from the base and a lit walk-through arch, across Canada. Park Creative Studio came up with the idea. shōmi! Custom fabricated it into reality. Here’s how it went together.
The Brief: Custom Pop-Up Fabrication for Sephora Clean
The idea from Park Creative Studio was to make the pop-up feel like walking on clouds, with a clean, airy look. Clouds are free if you’re the sky. For everyone else, it takes a mould.
Four kinds of asset carried the idea:
- Three-dimensional cloud structures.
- A printed floor.
- Illuminated product stands.
- A lit walk-through arch.
The Engineering Challenges
Three problems, one pop-up.
Make the clouds see-through. A solid white cloud was never going to match the clean look Sephora wanted, so the 3D clouds had to be transparent. That fit the look, and it meant every seam would show.
Make it hold up in eight stores. The pop-up had to be durable and easy to install across every location, not just look good in the one where someone took the photos.
Light it so it looks clean. The lighting had to reinforce the clean look and still light the products properly. A product you can’t see is technically very clean, but not exactly helpful.
The Build
The clouds. A mould was made from the designed 3D cloud model, and the clouds were vacuum-formed in clear acrylic. They were made in two halves and glued together into one see-through structure. A solid cloud would have read as a heavy object in a room meant to feel airy. A clear one shows every seam, so the seams had to be designed in, not hidden. On a see-through cloud, there’s nowhere to hide.
The floor. The floor was printed with a blue sky and clouds, so it blends seamlessly with the cloud structures. Yes, that puts the sky on the floor. Weird? Maybe, but that was the idea.
The light. LED modules were installed in the bases of the product stands, so the light shines through clear acrylic. That gives the products a soft, clean glow while lighting them.
The arch. A walk-through arch has to hold up when someone walks under it, survive being bumped, and still look like it belongs next to translucent graphics. The usual instinct is to build a solid shell and paint it. We’ve found that breaks down quickly: paint on a solid face shows every scuff, and a lit solid surface glows unevenly. So the arch was built in layers, each doing one job. The inside is an MDF substructure that gives the arch its strength and holds the lights and wiring. That is wrapped in silver mirror vinyl, so people looking in see a reflection of the interior instead of wood or paint. The outer layer is clear acrylic with a blue gradient on transparent vinyl: from the outside you see through the blue, and from the inside the reflection keeps it feeling light. The trade-off is planning. Every layer has to be sequenced so the lights, wiring and vinyl stay reachable until the next layer goes on, because the alternative is cutting into finished work to fix a wire.
The Real Lesson
Busy retail stores are not known for their gentleness toward clouds. Surviving them took a mould, clear acrylic, some well-placed LEDs and an arch built in layers. The idea comes from the creative studio. Getting it to survive a retail store is the part we’re paid for.
Planning a custom pop-up? Get in touch with our shomi! Custom team to talk through your build.
