RETAIL · CLIENT WORK

Experiencia Morada

Taking a drink from the table to the shelf without losing what made it worth drinking

Client

Lucha Partners — La Lucha Sanguchería

Role

Design and materials

Year

2025

Team

2 designers

Format

Product vision — 1 month

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La Lucha Sanguchería, Lima. Add Visualisation. if it isn't a real photo.

The client wouldn't pay for consumer research. So we took the evidence out of the product instead.

01

THE BRIEF

La Lucha is one of Lima's best-known sangucherías, and its chicha morada is part of why people go. The bottled product already existed. The brief was to make it reachable from a supermarket, with something distinctive enough to carry what La Lucha stands for.

That is an executional brief, and the executional answer is a nicer display. But chicha morada at a table isn't a beverage — it's a moment. It arrives cold in a heavy glass, it smells of clove and pineapple rind, the colour is absurd. On a shelf, stripped of all that, it is purple liquid competing on price against industrial brands with better distribution.

The product was never the problem. The brief was really: how does a bottle on a shelf carry an experience that happens at a table?

The supermarket aisle the drink had to stand out in.

02

THE CONSTRAINT THAT SHAPED EVERYTHING

The client's culture was built on a traditional offer and did not include direct research with consumers. That wasn't an oversight — it was a position, and it wasn't going to change inside a one-month engagement.

Which removed the standard toolkit. No interviews, no shopper observation, no concept testing.

So the question became: if you can't ask people what the experience is, where else is the evidence?

Our answer was the product itself. Chicha morada is made in front of you, from ingredients you can see, over fire. The experience isn't hidden in consumer opinion — it's sitting in the material, and nobody had looked there.

03

EXTRACTING EVIDENCE FROM THE MATERIAL

I ran the sensory exploration as a production exercise rather than a workshop. We prepared chicha traditionally, over open fire, and documented what the process actually produced:

Colour — we stained wood directly with chicha, then burned it. The result is a deep purple-brown with a scorched grain: rustic, warm, unmistakably derived from the drink.
Texture — the dye-and-burn process produced a family of surface finishes we could specify, not just describe.
Light — we recorded how light projects through the liquid. Chicha is not opaque; it glows.
Smell and heat — documented from the fogón preparation as inputs to the retail concept.

The finding that carried the project: the display material could be dyed with the product it displays.

Not a colour matched to a brand guideline. The actual liquid, on the actual wood. The shelf and the drink share a substance — which gave the concept a defensible answer to "why does it look like this," a question every client asks and most concepts answer with taste.

03

EXTRACTING EVIDENCE FROM THE MATERIAL

I ran the sensory exploration as a production exercise rather than a workshop. We prepared chicha traditionally, over open fire, and documented what the process actually produced:

Colour — we stained wood directly with chicha, then burned it. The result is a deep purple-brown with a scorched grain: rustic, warm, unmistakably derived from the drink.
Texture — the dye-and-burn process produced a family of surface finishes we could specify, not just describe.
Light — we recorded how light projects through the liquid. Chicha is not opaque; it glows.
Smell and heat — documented from the fogón preparation as inputs to the retail concept.

The finding that carried the project: the display material could be dyed with the product it displays.

A block of wood left in chicha morada. The display is stained with the drink it sells.

The stained wood after burning: purple-brown, scorched grain.

Light through chicha. It isn't opaque, it glows.

Second light study, used for the lit vessel in the display.

04

CO-DESIGN WITH A CLIENT WHO HAD OPINIONS

With a materials direction in hand, Alonso and I designed a method to get the client's creative team into the decision rather than reviewing it afterwards: moodboards built from the briefing and desk research, then a facilitated vote to select the aesthetic direction.

The room contained a Creative Director, a Marketing Coordinator, a General Manager and a Founder. Design direction was going to be decided by whoever spoke last.

Making the selection explicit and collective meant the direction was theirs before we developed it — which is why it survived the next three weeks of iteration.

Weekly in-person sessions defined the consumer journey and the sensory moments. A direct channel with their creative team meant each round of drawings came back refined rather than re-litigated.

04

CO-DESIGN WITH A CLIENT WHO HAD OPINIONS

The room contained a Creative Director, a Marketing Coordinator, a General Manager and a Founder. Design direction was going to be decided by whoever spoke last.

Making the selection explicit and collective meant the direction was theirs before we developed it — which is why it survived the next three weeks of iteration.

Weekly in-person sessions defined the consumer journey and the sensory moments. A direct channel with their creative team meant each round of drawings came back refined rather than re-litigated.

Client vote on three aesthetic directions. Each sticker is a vote.

05

THE CONCEPT, MADE VISIBLE

I produced the visual and three-dimensional proposals and built out the concept alongside them: renders, 3D studies, and the point-of-purchase system.

Point-of-purchase design — a shelf presence built from the stained-wood material system
Sensory branding — visual and tactile cues carrying the table experience into the aisle
Shopper journey — the sequence from noticing to reaching to buying
Product-system logic — the bottle as one touchpoint among several, not the whole offer

The module is a chicha vessel that reads as a vessel: the liquid visible, lit, sitting on crates rather than on retail furniture. In the aisle it is the only thing that doesn't look like a shelf.

06

A PROPOSAL, NOT A VISION

I coordinated with suppliers to produce a formal cost estimate for building the concept.

This is the part most concept projects skip. A render tells a client what something could look like; a quotation tells them what it costs to find out.

Without a number, a visionamiento stays a nice deck. With one, it becomes a decision the client can actually take.

The vision was delivered and costed. It has not been built. That is what a one-month visioning engagement produces: a direction the client can price, argue about internally, and decide on — on their own timeline and against their own capital priorities. The deliverable was met, and I'd rather say that plainly than let the page imply a shelf launch that never happened.

06

A PROPOSAL, NOT A VISION

I coordinated with suppliers to produce a formal cost estimate for building the concept.

This is the part most concept projects skip. A render tells a client what something could look like; a quotation tells them what it costs to find out.

Without a number, a visionamiento stays a nice deck. With one, it becomes a decision the client can actually take.

07

MY ROLE

Two designers, one month, a client with a strong internal creative team. Alonso led the client relationship and the project management. I owned the material, the form, and the cost.

What I produced:

Field research on the La Lucha brand
The sensory exploration and its material outputs — the chicha-stained and burned wood, the texture family, the light studies
All renders and three-dimensional proposals
The concept build-out alongside the visual work
Supplier coordination and the formal cost estimate

What we did together: the co-design methodology — the moodboard dynamic and the facilitated vote that set the aesthetic direction.

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