On September 10, 2024, Clarins Canada ran its Hotel Press Trip for the Hotel Double Serum at the Shangri-La Hotel Vancouver, 1128 West Georgia Street, in Vancouver, BC. Booth Empire delivered the centerpiece of the press experience: a custom-built Beauty Crimes Confessional video booth designed to give guests a memorable, brand-specific way to engage with the Double Serum story.
The activation was built around a single creative concept that only makes sense for Clarins. Guests were invited to step into the confessional and record their personal Beauty Crimes on camera, inside a custom double-sided printed enclosure designed specifically for the Hotel Double Serum campaign.
The Brief: Introduce Disruption into the Press Experience
Beauty press trips can drift into a predictable rhythm: product display, brand presentation, sample stations, and one-on-one conversations with the brand team. The Clarins brief for the Hotel Double Serum press trip was explicit about avoiding that pattern. The objective was to introduce a disruption element into the press experience - something that would break the expected rhythm and give invited guests a memorable, shareable reason to talk about the product.
A confessional video booth solves that brief in a specific way. It is not a photo booth. It is a private, sound-treated recording space where guests speak directly to camera. For a press audience that has seen every standard product activation, the confessional format introduces the kind of unexpected moment that earns coverage and social posts.
The Beauty Crimes Concept
The creative concept is what makes this activation specific to Clarins. Rather than running a generic confessional where guests answer bland questions, the booth was built around the idea of Beauty Crimes - personal skincare and beauty confessions the guests had been carrying around and could now get off their chest on camera.
That concept does several things at once:
- It is a play on the word “serum” and the Double Serum product itself - beauty crimes are the things Double Serum is here to fix
- It is playful, which matches how beauty press content gets shared
- It is personal, which produces testimonial-style content a standard photo booth cannot
- It is brand-specific, not a generic confessional concept that could run for any client
The confessional invited guests to record their own Beauty Crimes on camera, producing video content that was simultaneously on-brand for Double Serum and individually shareable for the press guest who recorded it.
The Custom Double-Sided Printed Enclosure
The build itself was a custom confessional video booth with a double-sided printed enclosure. That detail matters because a confessional activation stands or falls on how the enclosure reads inside the room.
- Double-sided printed exterior - both faces of the enclosure carried Clarins Hotel Double Serum branding, so the unit read as a designed piece of the event environment from any angle
- Sound-treated recording space - the inside of the confessional had to produce clean, usable video and audio, not noisy trade-show-floor capture
- Camera and capture setup - the recording rig was integrated into the enclosure, so guests stepped in and recorded without needing an operator to direct them
A confessional with single-sided printing reads as a prop; a confessional with double-sided custom printing reads as a brand installation. The choice to print both faces of the enclosure was scoped to how the activation would actually sit in the room at the Shangri-La.
The Shangri-La Vancouver Setting
The Shangri-La Hotel Vancouver is the city’s tallest building and one of its most premium event venues. That choice of venue set the standard for the activation: the confessional enclosure, the capture setup, and the on-site operation all had to read as polished as the venue around them.
Premium hotel venues also have specific logistics the build has to accommodate. The confessional had to fit inside the Shangri-La’s event space, run cleanly without disrupting the rest of the press trip, and produce branded video content that could be delivered to press guests during or immediately after the event.
Why a Confessional for a Beauty Press Trip
Beauty press trips are built on the relationship between the brand and the press guest. The product gets covered because the guest has a memorable experience with the brand, not because the brand pitched the product. A confessional booth produces that kind of memorable experience by giving the guest something to do that is more interesting than another product sample.
The Beauty Crimes format is what made the activation work for Clarins specifically. Each guest’s confession is simultaneously a piece of personal content they can post and a piece of Double Serum-branded content Clarins can use. That dual function is what makes a confessional a better fit for a beauty press trip than a photo booth: it produces content that works for both the guest and the brand.
Activation by the Numbers
- Custom Beauty Crimes Confessional built for the Clarins Hotel Press Trip
- Double-sided printed enclosure with Hotel Double Serum branding
- Sound-treated recording space inside the confessional
- Shangri-La Hotel Vancouver at 1128 West Georgia Street as the venue
- Beauty Crimes concept designed specifically for the Double Serum campaign
Book a Similar Activation
Booth Empire designs custom activations for beauty brands in Vancouver, Montreal, and across Canada and the United States, including confessional booths, custom video builds, branded photo booths, and bespoke installations for product launches, press trips, and influencer events. Contact Booth Empire to scope a custom confessional or brand-specific activation for your next beauty event, or browse the full case study library.
