Desperados believes all young adults need to free themselves from the established norms in order to build their own personality.

To bring this spirit to life, the brand has always tried to feature the Desperados of our times: Street artists. Two decades ago, Desperados started to collaborate with the 9th concept, a French collective of renowned street artists.

Ever since the collective have been designing its limited editions, more than 70 so far. This time, we were challenged to reinvent the edition.

Desperados ‘Edition Augmentee’ was born. The bottle acted as the gateway into a phygital installation by the 9th concept artist Matthieu Dagorn. It takes consumers on a journey into an artwork that’s both, real and fictive.

The bottle was designed to be the key. Mobile was acting as the door. And VR technology combined with Dagorn’s physical sculpture represented the room up for discovery.

Desperados ‘Edition Augmentee’ is more than just a limited edition. It embodies a new dimension of street art.

We chose Matthieu from the 9th concept because AR and VR felt like a natural extension of his artistic path. Our aim was to respect his physical work whilst enhancing it virtually. Google’s tilt brush technology - a 3D painting virtual reality application - neatly tied into his style. Matthieu was trained in virtual reality painting and soon became an advocate of it.

We then challenged him to create an urban artwork and enhance it digitally. Matthieu locked himself away for 10 days and let his imagination run free.

The result was astonishing, a real masterpiece at consumer’s fingertips: All they needed to do was to download the Desperados app and scan the label. They were taken on a journey into Matthieu’s art. Through 4 levels of navigation they experienced AR, followed by the creation of the physical artwork and its virtual counterpart, both in 360 videos. A making of video closed the experience loop.

Besides making the experience easy to access, we educated consumers through a step-by-step guide on the bottle itself and on tri-pack packaging. Furthermore, we used influencers to share live demonstrations within social.

We organised an exhibition in Paris to introduce the first phygital street artwork to the public. The installation was also exhibited at the Urban Art Fair and finally it travelled across France, from one local event to the next. Journalists and influencers were always present. They spread the word about ‘Edition Augmentee’ and street art lovers all over France were listening with their mobiles in hand.

Desperados produced 1.7 million ‘Edition Augmentee’ bottles to get distributed over a period of 6 months.

Desperados ‘Edition Augmentee’ is more than just a limited edition. It embodies a new dimension of street art that pushes back the limits - just like a Desperado.

Since we only launched the Augmented Edition on 6th April, we do not have significant figures to submit yet.

However, we organized an exhibition in Paris, on the 6th April, to present the phygital project to journalists, bloggers & influencers.

Here are some of the articles published after the event:

Contagious : http://www.contagious.com/blogs/news-and-views/desperados-augmented-edition

Journal du Geek : http://www.journaldugeek.com/2017/04/13/quand-la-realite-virtuelle-et-lart-sinvitent-sur-les-bouteilles-de-desperados/

Fubiz : http://www.fubiz.net/2017/04/07/new-street-art-vr-design-experience-by-desperados/?fb_share

Cyclones Mag : https://www.cyclonesmag.fr/entretien-avec-matthieu-dagorn-le-street-artiste-derriere-la-bouteille-collector-desperadosaugmentee/

So far, we have had more than 25 articles, many lives on Facebook and Snapchat and Stories on Instagram from bloggers and influencers.

We can also still specify that after 2 weeks of distribution, the app has been downloaded 3900 times on IOS a& ANDROID.

And finally, we published on our networks 4 “teasing”