CHANDON · 2022

Garden Spritz

A product launch disguised as a treasure hunt — five installations across Washington, D.C.

CHANDON Garden Spritz

A city-scale brand experience that transformed Georgetown into a Secret Garden — turning product discovery into a social journey of clues, rituals, and shared moments.

Creative Direction Experience Design Environmental Design Art Direction

ClientCHANDON

AgencyAdmerasia

RoleCreative Director

ArtChiao-Chen Lu

3D DesignerVin Kim

LeadMaxwell Davidson

ProducerVivian Lau, Isabel Ng

PhotographyCameron Wilder

Year2022

Experience touchpoints across Georgetown over one weekend

600+

Guests served at the Secret Garden main event

Drinkable Garden Spritz fountain as the experiential centerpiece

First localized activation of CHANDON's global Secret Garden platform

The brief was a global platform. The answer was a neighborhood — transformed into a journey of discovery, with a drinkable fountain at the end.

The Brief

A global brand platform. One American city. One weekend to land.

CHANDON's Garden Spritz — a sparkling wine and orange bitters apéritif — was being introduced to the U.S. market under the brand's global "Secret Garden" platform. Our brief was to translate that global idea into a localized launch experience that could feel ownable, memorable, and culturally specific to Washington, D.C.

The challenge was not visibility, but emotional participation — creating an experience audiences would actively seek out, move through, and remember. Product sampling alone would not be enough; the drink needed to be discovered physically, socially, and spatially.

CHANDON Secret Garden — main installation

The Approach

Build the city into the campaign. Make discovery the product.

The creative direction transformed the launch into a citywide scavenger hunt. Rather than designing a single event and asking people to arrive, we built a sequence of installations across Georgetown — each one a clue, each one a fragment of the Secret Garden, each one shareable on its own.

The choice of Georgetown was deliberate. Its layered streets, hidden courtyards, and elevated weekend foot traffic created the natural conditions for urban discovery. The neighborhood itself became the storyboard.

Rather than imposing mystery onto the environment, the experience amplified qualities Georgetown already possessed: tucked-away paths, intimate garden moments, and the feeling that something beautiful might be hidden just around the corner.

Across five distinct touchpoints, the visual world remained cohesive: hand-built florals in saturated coral and citrus tones, woven baskets brimming with whole oranges, soft natural textures, and one signature object — the Garden Spritz fountain — anchoring the final destination.

The Visual System

Coral, citrus, woven natural fibers. Saturated, but never loud.

The visual system extended Garden Spritz's product palette — coral, marigold, and soft citrus — into a built environmental language. Real oranges became a recurring material rather than a decorative motif, while woven baskets, raffia, and natural fibers grounded the brightness in warmth and tactility.

Print and signage remained intentionally restrained: a single typographic system across menus, fruit-crate decals, hotel garden invitations, and neon signage. Every clue needed to feel like part of the same world, even when encountered half a mile apart.

"The craft was in making five locations feel like one continuous place."

The system relied on recognition and rhythm: the same coral florals, orange motifs, typographic treatment, and hand-built quality repeated across the journey. As guests moved from one clue to the next, the visual language became familiar — turning separate installations into a connected brand world.

The Experience

Five installations. One scavenger hunt. One Secret Garden at the end.

The experience unfolded across Georgetown as a sequence of staged discoveries — each location designed to build anticipation toward the final Secret Garden destination. Floral caravans appeared in upscale market districts. A water taxi became a moving brand signal. A boutique hotel hid an intimate VIP garden behind its lobby. And at the end of the trail: the Secret Garden itself.

I led the environmental concept for all five locations and directed the visual system across florals, print, signage, and spatial layout. The goal was to choreograph movement through the city while preserving a consistent emotional and visual world at every touchpoint.

Destination

The Secret Garden

A fully built garden environment open to the public for tasting. Coral and citrus floral walls, hand-woven seating, a "Welcome to our Garden" neon, and at the center — a drinkable Garden Spritz fountain. Lines formed outside throughout the weekend.

Clue 01

Floral Caravan at Dean & Deluca

A miniature floral-covered cart placed outside one of Georgetown's most visited gourmet markets — overflowing with oranges and seasonal blooms, with subtle wayfinding pointing guests toward the Secret Garden.

Clue 02

Floral Caravan at The Wharf

A second caravan at D.C.'s waterfront district, designed to extend the campaign's reach beyond Georgetown and draw a different audience into the discovery journey.

Clue 03

Water Taxi Takeover

A working Potomac water taxi wrapped in Garden Spritz branding — turning the river into a moving brand moment and a third clue point within the larger urban experience.

Clue 04 · VIP

The Secret Garden at The Graham

An intimate VIP tasting garden hidden inside The Graham Georgetown — orange trees, neon, a Garden Spritz bar cart, and a reservation-only guest list. A quieter reward for those who followed the clues closely.

Hero Moment

The Garden Spritz Fountain.

At the center of the Secret Garden, we built the experience around a single ownable gesture: a tiered ornamental fountain designed like a classical garden centerpiece, flowing with Garden Spritz.

Guests filled their glasses directly from the fountain itself — transforming the act of tasting into something playful, theatrical, and instantly shareable.

The fountain reframed the product. Garden Spritz was not simply being served; it was being discovered, poured, and claimed from within the garden. The brand's "Secret Garden" platform became literal, physical, and unforgettable.

"The fountain didn't sell the drink. It rewrote the relationship people had to it."

This was the design decision that anchored the full experience. The scavenger hunt, the caravans, the water taxi — each touchpoint built anticipation toward one memorable object. By the end of the weekend, the fountain was not only the visual center of the Secret Garden; it was the artifact people came to find.

Result

A launch you had to find. A drink you remembered.

600+

Guests served at the Secret Garden — with lines forming outside throughout the weekend.

The Secret Garden drew lines down the block, while each caravan and the water taxi created visible points of discovery across the city. The fountain gave the experience a single, ownable image — one that carried the campaign beyond the guests who attended.

The activation became a blueprint for CHANDON's localized Garden Spritz experiences in the U.S. — demonstrating that a global platform does not need to be flattened into a national rollout. It can be translated into a specific city, a specific journey, and one unforgettable ritual people line up to experience.

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