Recreationally Bold

The frigid London breeze hits your skin as you promptly dress your shoulders in your light grey scarf. You board the tube on an 11 degree Monday morning to find yourself blending into the herd of black puffer jackets. The silhouette of the distressed brown brick buildings coincides with the grey sky above. Your office is filled with an array of black or maybe the occasional navy dress suit. Dull colours fill our everyday lives. Whatever the reason, bright colours seem to be hard to find in everyday society. Now, companies are honing in on nostalgia through whimsical participation in youthful environments. Big bright bold colours remind us of our childhood. Meet a brand that has brought youth back into our lives with big, bright, and bold colours through an immersive experience. Superette is a dispensary that makes purchasing cannabis as pleasurable as using it. Read more about this brand in Recreationally Bold.

It is psychologically proven that big bright and bold colours make us happier. As children, our toys and rooms were filled with these colours because they were easier to distinguish in the early days of our eyesight forming. Therefore we associate colour with playfulness and happiness. Colour preferences are therefore deeply rooted emotional responses for us. Darker colours make us feel sadder, while bright colours instil happiness. So, these brands have taken to bright colours to boost our moods and exude more happiness in our day to day lives through exhibits that are simply enticing just to look at.

Our black and white world lacks so much colour from clothing to storefronts, we play it safe by picking and choosing neutral colours. But, Superette is not afraid to stand out with its new cannabis dispensary.

Sip ‘N’ Smoke, a first of its kind “express” cannabis retail concept located in Toronto sold through a happy colour-wheel-filled store. It immediately catches your eye with a big burst of primary colours, the colours we grabbed from the crayon box in primary school  

The walls are bright and the floors checkered, all coming together to create a fresh grocery store dispensary experience for anyone 19+ to enjoy in several Canada locations. 

Imagine, you have just sat through your 9-5 office job. Eyes glued to your tablet throughout the entire day. As you leave the office you come across this storefront that immediately floods your body with feelings of nostalgia. The bright store stands out amongst the rest on the street. The bright and bold colours taste refreshing. 
 

“Superette works to build an emotional connection with consumers through hyperlocal elements and an immersive, gamified shopping experience.”

Like Superette, another brand has utilised colour as a gateway to a reinvented launderette that glows and shines brighter than anyone you have seen before. Each washing machine takes on the colour of a different stripe of the rainbow.

The designer Yinka Lori has created another bold and bright immersive experience, but, you can find it located here, in East London. His work and design aesthetic is distinguished by its vivid use of colour.

He has collaborated with Lego to re-create your communal laundry into a youthful children’s play zone. That’s right, no folding laundry or removing lint build-up, instead, look inside the cleaning machines to find magical lego creations that come together to form this innovative playground.

“The Launderette of Dreams features Ilori’s signature bold colours and geometric shapes, applied across ten “washing machines” and the walls of a shopfront on Bethnal Green Road in east London.”

Creating the experience as a shared love of nostalgia from his childhood times playing in his local launderette in London. Now, children can walk into the magical space for fun in his new immersive location in collaboration with Lego.

For a slightly more grown-up interactive experience Yuri Suzuki, a sound artist, has produced an installation in London’s Brown Hart Gardens (W1K 6WP) that consists of a handful of groovy talking ‘horns’ as a means of catching the sounds of the city. The horns brighten up their surroundings with their chromaticity of red, yellow, and blue.

“The sculpture amplifies the sounds absorbed from the surroundings and transports voice recordings from people at street level through its stems.” This ‘Sonic Bloom’ not only connects people to the sounds of the city but also to the playfulness of their childhood through bold colours and an innocent activity that is fun for all.

Something about these three exhibits makes our mouths water and our eyes bulge. They are the epitome of eye candy.

Although with a more monochrome pastel colour scheme, Lonely Ghost has created a unique storefront to serve as a shopping location for their clothing brand, a pop-up shop ‘Lonely Ghost Grocery’. Founders, Indy Blue and Bronson Christensen, also took to reinventing another everyday experience into something more.

Alongside hundreds of other American influences, Blue and Christensen wanted to stand out in the launch of their clothing brand.

The recurring theme here? Nostalgia.

“We were inspired by the timeless feeling of a grocery store. The checkerboard flooring, the rainbow of fruit and vegetables in the produce section, begging your mom to buy some sugar cereal. Everyone can remember that feeling. That nostalgia was the perfect starting point for us,” explained the founders.

As costumers, there is something very appealing to brands like these who have taken the creative liberty to make once boring adulting errands into variations of a wonderland.

These three formations have brought back our youth into different aspects of our everyday lives. I do not think anyone could complain about the possibility of being transported back in time to experience the innocence that was our youth. Through big, bright, bold, and fun colours, we are taken back to UNO games, monopoly, picture books, and building blocks (also known as happy times).

If you enjoyed reading Recreationally Bold, why not check out Shoot for the Moon, Land in Chanel.

Find out more at: https://superetteshop.com, https://www.timeout.com, https://www.dezeen.com, and https://lonelyghost.co