The retail perfume industry often lacks the multi-sensory engagement needed to frame the perception of a fragrance and thus facilitate the fragrance selection process. Scent is very ambiguous and needs cues from other senses to better place a scent (Pierzchajlo et al., 2024). This project, conducted in collaboration with the Dutch perfume brand Fugazzi, explores how cross-modal sensory correspondences, combining scent with visual, auditory, and tactile cues—can create immersive and intuitive experiences. Through a series of exploration sprints, associations between fragrances and sensory modalities such as color, texture, shape, and sound were investigated. These findings were later applied to develop a concept in two deepening sprints. These sprints build on each other, and the concept is iterated through these sprints.

Findings revealed that multi-sensory integration can influence customer perception of fragrances and align their expectations with the olfactory experience. These insights were applied to the chosen design direction: d’Accord, a display enabling customers to select preferred fragrance accords and receive suggestions that correlate with the chosen accord. The user receives sensorial stimuli that frame the perception of a scent. The found associations between scent and color, shape and context are used in this concept.

Cross-modal correspondences between smell and vision can be used to frame the perception of a fragrance. Visual stimuli could make the perception of a fragrance less ambiguous. D’Accord had the highest effect on the pleasure scale, making the perception of fragrances with a less defined emotion profile less ambiguous.