The Fragance Matchmaker - Regular Animal

THE FRAGRANCE MATCHMAKER
Art Direction, Copywriting, & Editorial Design

Training beauty advisors to sell fragrance is one thing. Training them to read people is another.

FOR CAROLINA HERRERA, REGULAR ANIMAL DEVELOPED AN IMMERSIVE TRAINING EXPERIENCE DESIGNED TO TRANSFORM FRAGRANCE PROFILING INTO SOMETHING MORE INTUITIVE, EMOTIONAL, AND HUMAN.

The result was The Fragrance Matchmaker: a tactile card-based system where Beauty Advisors learn to decode personalities, moods, intentions, and emotional cues through live conversation and storytelling.

Built around Carolina Herrera’s “Acknowledge → Discover → Satisfy” methodology, the experience turned retail education into an elegant exercise in empathy, intuition, and connection.

THE CHALLENGE

Traditional fragrance training often focuses on memorizing notes, product benefits, or sales techniques. Carolina Herrera wanted something more dynamic: a way for Beauty Advisors to practice real human interaction while strengthening their confidence in fragrance recommendation and storytelling.

The goal was to create a learning experience that could:

— Bring the profiling method to life through practice.
— Help advisors sharpen emotional intelligence and observation skills.

— Encourage more meaningful conversations with shoppers.

— Make training collaborative, memorable, and emotionally engaging.

REGULAR ANIMAL translated Carolina Herrera’s profiling system into a physical matchmaking experience built around roleplay, emotional archetypes, and conversation prompts.

Participants alternate between playing the Shopper and the Beauty Advisor. Through a combination of Character Cards and Beauty Advisor prompts, they navigate realistic fragrance consultations designed to mirror the complexity and nuance of real retail interactions.

Rather than focusing on product memorization alone, the system trains Beauty Advisors to recognize behavior patterns, emotional states, purchase intentions, and conversational cues. The experience blends the structure of a training tool with the emotional language of fashion, fragrance, and personal storytelling.

At the center of the experience are two custom-designed decks.

Forty unique shopper profiles were developed to represent different moods, behaviors, occasions, and purchasing intentions.

Some shoppers arrive looking for confidence. Others for comfort, seduction, nostalgia, celebration, or escape.

Each character includes a portrait and name, along with emotional cues and a distinct behavior style that help bring their personality to life. The profile also explores their shopping context and intent, offering insight into what has brought them to the fragrance counter and what they are truly looking for. To deepen this understanding, each character features a first-person quote that reveals their mindset, as well as practical guidance for the Beauty Advisor on how to connect with them in a meaningful way.

While their reasons may differ, each shopper is driven by an emotional need that goes beyond choosing a fragrance.

The cards were intentionally designed to feel aspirational yet believable, drawing inspiration from fashion casting cards and editorial portraits rather than traditional training materials. The goal is to help Beauty Advisors recognize the person behind the purchase and approach every interaction with greater empathy, curiosity, and confidence.

The second deck contains forty conversation prompts crafted to help advisors guide interactions naturally and elegantly.

Rather than scripted sales questions, the prompts encourage emotional discovery and sensory dialogue:

“What’s the mood you want to step into when wearing your fragrance — playful, powerful, or seductive?”

The prompts help advisors adapt their tone depending on the shopper’s personality; emotional, reserved, rational, expressive, reinforcing Carolina Herrera’s profiling methodology through practice rather than theory.

REGULAR ANIMAL also developed additional gameplay dynamics and live performance formats to expand the training experience into group workshops and collaborative sessions.

The system was designed to be flexible, scalable, and immersive, allowing Carolina Herrera teams to adapt the experience across different training environments while maintaining a consistent brand language and visual identity.

Every detail — from typography and photography direction to the tactile quality of the decks and packaging — was developed to feel unmistakably Carolina Herrera: bold, elegant, emotional, and refined.

The Fragrance Matchmaker transformed fragrance education into a living conversation.

By combining profiling psychology, storytelling, and experiential learning, REGULAR ANIMAL created a training tool that helped Beauty Advisors move beyond product knowledge and into something more valuable: the ability to understand people.

Elegant, tactile, and emotionally intelligent, the experience brought Carolina Herrera’s approach to fragrance consultation to life through practice, intuition, and play.

THE FRAGRANCE MATCHMAKERArt Direction, Copywriting, & Editorial Design