La Ruche de Noel 2019
A project with the Galeries Lafayette, Paris

I have had the supreme honor to work with an amazing team of designers and artists at the Galeries Lafayette, Paris over the course of the last 9 months helping them visualize and develop the Christmas Hive concept for their windows, characters, packaging, animation and print collateral (including outdoor advertising and catalog covers). Not only was there a breadth of things to work on, character design was important as the Galeries Lafayette and their neighboring sister store, Printemps— both have marionettes (yes!! puppets) in the windows—so these funny bees needed to be figured out so that the puppet designer would have a starting point.

This work ended up everywhere from the face of the building to all the Metro and bus posters, to the covers of catalogs, bags, and so much more. I have shown a few here, and will create a page to give you a broader look at all these applications.

The theme this year was based on bees— funny bees that assisted their Queen Bee to prepare and celebrate the best holiday ever with the background of the glorious Galeries Lafayette architecture and the city of Paris. Over the course of eight months, the team presented very tight briefs with the entire palette defined up front, along with reference, tone and feel, along with schemas for how they visualized each window/story and the 3 dimensional elements they were developing into the design. However, not in my wildest dreams did I imagine the magic, the absolute delight I experienced when the windows were unveiled. To see the fruit of this experience reaching out and engaging children and their parents was something I fully did not understand the gift that was to me.

I have posted the visualizations of the windows, characters and some of the optional work that was developed but not used. Please use the linked illustrations below to dive into the various windows and illustrations along with project components and different applications.