Yummi Candles Pop-Ups
PRINT DESIGN | BRANDING & IDENTITY
Yummi Candles has three permanent retail locations in the Greater Toronto Area: one in Toronto’s historic Distillery District, Queen West, and a factory store in Mississauga. In addition to these, there are two pop-up retail locations which opened during the Summer months of 2019. One was located within Yorkdale Mall and the other was a kiosk-style pop-up shop within Upper Canada Mall.
Over the Spring and Summer months leading up to their opening, I had the opportunity to design everything from the store layouts, front hoarding and wall vinyls, to point of sale signage and other printed assets.
This was a challenging project because of the sheer scale of the space. The Yorkdale store alone was 75 feet deep. I had never worked on a project of this scale before, nor had I ever really worked on an experiential store design project.
The Design Process: Yorkdale
The goal for this pop-up location was to create a fun and engaging new Yummi Candles store location which would be a natural extension of Yummi’s sleek, modern, minimalist luxury brand, that would appeal to Yorkdale’s diverse and upscale customer base.
Yorkdale is one of the largest shopping malls in the country and has the highest sales per unit area of any mall in Canada. At 18 million annual visitors, it is one of the country’s busiest malls. The mall spans over 2 million square feet and contains over 270 stores, including many premium offerings, designer brands, and luxury retailers.
The Yummi Candles Pop-Up Factory location in Yorkdale mall offers a unique experience exclusive to this location: The Fragrance Curated Experience. The Experience allows clients to select up to six fragrances from a proprietary collection of over 45 perfume grade fragrances and pair them with any of Yummi Candles’ 11 styles of glass votive tumblers. The made-to-order candles are hand-poured in store by a Yummi certified chandler and presented in a gift box along with some Yummi swag in a gift bag.
During the design process I designed several different iterations of the store layout and wall vinyl designs as per my director’s instruction and feedback.
The store was laid out in such a way that one side would be a product merchandise side, and the other side would be a production area for the Fragrance Curated Experience. Our initial plan was to have the racking away from the walls so that the customers could walk between the racks and would be able to see the vinyls on the walls without obstruction. In this case, our plan was to feature company information, illustrations, and photographic collages on the walls.
Due to space limitations we ended up placing the racks directly against the walls and thus the design concepts changed. Instead, we decided to go with a typographic and iconographic based design for the wall vinyls which would be informational, inspirational, and witty, and which would serve more as a visual texture than a focal point in the store design.
The vinyls on the product merchandising side include a typographic texture comprised of inspirational quotations involving candles, light, flames, wax, and the like, in addition to general company info, i.e. “Made in Canada”, “Makers of fine candles since 1976”, and the company tagline “ambiance – decor – occasions”.
The vinyls on the inside entry wall include quotes as well, however these are more isolated and easier to read. There is also a “dripping” colour motif coming down from the top (which is also used on the storefront/hoarding and on the Fragrance Curated bifold cards). Each colour included in this motif is one of the 45 candle colours which the company sells.
The production side wall vinyls are iconographic based and include safety warning icons as well as product attributes, such as “plant-based wax”, “cotton-braided wicks”, “small batch”, “hand-poured”, etc.
