The concept for the holiday promotion was “Share Beauty”, derived from idea that the act of sharing itself is beautiful. Shiseido wanted to support families, friends, lovers, anyone who wanted to share their feelings of love and gratitude over the holidays, to spread the positive force of beauty and empathy. The short online film featuring paper craft animation showed various scenes of gift giving in order to be relatable to audiences. In the mobile site, users were able to create personalized message videos by selecting certain scenes from the online film and a message, to wrap into a digital gift box and send it to loved ones. The paper craft art featured in the short film was also distributed to customers as greeting cards, as well as displayed in store windows. The concept of “Share Beauty” was spread in both digital and physical.

The story takes place in Ginza Tokyo, where Shiseido was founded. The growing Karakusa vines symbolize beauty being shared and spread, visually showing the viewer “the positive force of beauty through empathy”. For the online film, the 760 pages of detailed hand drawn illustrations were precisely cut out, sometimes as thin as 0.1mm, layered to create depth in each frame, and shot in stop-motion. By constructing the online film to be vignettes of various scenes, we were able to create other contents derived from that. In the mobile site, users were able to select a scene relatable to them, and create an original digital gift box with a message to deliver to loved ones. The paper craft was used to create greeting cards and window displays so that customers could see and touch the delicate art, and give it out as gifts in physical stores.

17,000 Greeting cards featuring the delicate paper craft were printed. In Japan, the greeting cards were placed to give away in more than 100 stores. In digital, 40% of the visitors created their own digital GREETING BOX and sent it to friends and family around the world. The promotion ended in success as people were able to relate to Shiseido’s vision of sharing beauty to make a world a better place, through Shiseido’s rich heritage.