L’Occitane en Provence wanted a creative piece showing the importance of the protection of Provence biodiversity. They asked us for an innovative digital activation standing out from average cosmetics activations and touching a larger audience evolving between pop-culture and snackable content. With a 150K Budget, we designed a tamagotchi like game, turning their iconic plants into cute seeds. People learned to take care of them by giving sun, water and love through hooking mini games. The more they played and the more they collected new seeds. Each grown up plant rewards gamers with many gifts including real seeds of the plant they could collect in each L’Occitane shop. A digital game available in 21 countries, and an average of 24 minutes playing with thousands of seeds planted around the world.

L’Occitane en Provence wanted a creative piece showing the importance of the protection of Provence biodiversity. They asked us for an innovative digital activation standing out from average cosmetics activations and touching a larger audience evolving between pop-culture and snackable content. We designed a tamagotchi like game, turning their iconic plants into cute seeds. People learned to take care of them by giving sun, water and love through hooking mini games. The more they played and the more they collected new seeds. Each grown up plant rewards gamers with many gifts including real seeds of the plant they could collect in each L’Occitane shop. A digital game available in 21 countries, and an average of 24 minutes playing with thousands of seeds planted around the world.

L’Occitane en Provence is one of the most famous French cosmetics retailers available in more than 90 countries. But all their products come from a really small place in France: Land of Provence, and all these species come from really small things: seeds. We designed a digital game to show this fragile bond between the seeds and the products by turning their iconic plants into an iconic tamagotchi game. Nowadays gaming is one of the biggest industries. The variety of video games leave enough space for any type of gamers, pro or casual.’Occitane audience, 25-50 is the right audience for casual gaming and they are really engaged with the value of the brand.

We wanted to use the mobile gaming code to create an emotional and playful experience with different levels of engagement, adapted to the time users wanted to spend.

We designed a digital game to show this fragile bond between the seeds and the products by turning their iconic plants into iconic tamagotchi like design. People had to take care of them by giving water, sun and love through mini-games and wait carefully to reach each step of their evolution using games mechanics and design. Depending on their actions they could unlock and collect new seeds and make their garden bigger.

We came with the idea to craft a real tamagotchi game and not a classic over branded advergame. Everything from the design to the gameplay has to contribute to create attachment and connection with the little seeds. We came from a long period of chara-design to define the characters of each seed with questions like why you feel attached to a digital creature in order to create a smooth and natural experience.

We analysed many popular games such as pokemon for pet’s evolution mechanics, LocoRoco design and all amazing Nintendo work on emotional design.

From that we created our own gameplay mechanics based on the average digital type of consummation. We created a curve of gameplay adapted to three kinds of players: the casual who just wanted to grow one seed and play and enjoy some minutes, the player who wanted to grow more than one seed and the completionist, invested to finish the game, unlock big rewards and come into shops. Different rewards including unlocking new seeds, L’Occitane products made from the plant, real seeds exclusive package and for those who finished the game, A real tree planted in Provence.

A digital game available in 21 countries, and an average of 24 minutes playing with thousands of seeds planted around the world.

In only two months Seeds of dreams became the most effective digital campaign of L'Occitane en Provence with an average gaming time of 24 minutes and 15% of people who grew all their seeds and spent more than 1 hour on the game. Nearly half a million of seeds have been planted in the game and in 21 countries. More than 35% of users came back to the game after playing. We get 32% of users who weren't familiar with the brand but came for the tamagotchi like aspect and share it to the gaming community.

We also had tons of positive reactions, messages and memes created by users who fell in love with their digital seeds. The game became one of the highest rated scores on FWA and one of the most loved websites of the year.