DigitasLBi Boston welcomes our SVP of Experience Design — Brent Eveleth!
By: Christina Goodwin
Tags: Design Process, Retail Technology, Experience Design, Advertising, Team Leadership

The Boston XD team at DigitasLBi recently welcomed Brent Eveleth to our team as our new SVP. I sat down with Brent to hear more about his past, his plans and his advice for the young leaders in his charge. Eveleth is excited to be back in Boston, after several years in New York, and he’s excited to tap into the academic intellect and wide array of industries at our fingertips.

Changes in leadership are never easy. Even when going from one awesome leader to another (as we are), the transition itself can feel like a first day of school —a new teacher awaits you, who you depend on for your growth and well-being, and you just hope it works out.

1980s

BAR HARBOR, ME —The charm of the local, handmade souvenir shop is deceptively complex. The average tourist may just want a t-shirt that reminds them of that delicious lobster roll they had the day before, but how does one make an entire space capture that experience? If done right, it’ll be something that an average tourist doesn’t notice implicitly, but remembers emotionally, and in that memory, the connection to a brand experience is made.

Imagine for a moment a scruffy art and comic book-loving kid in a Bar Harbor souvenir shop window, arranging the latest summer display; something elegant and clever that will entice a new batch of tourists to come in and shop. He’s carefully composing some tchotchkes, some pillows or hats, maybe even some t-shirts he designed himself. For a few minutes in the morning, a young Brent Eveleth gets to mess around with creating an environment that gives folks a taste of Maine.

When I asked Brent where his love of retail & physical experience design came from, his eyes (and I think his beard too) lit up talking about how he started out designing the display windows for that local shop.

“It was a transformative thing at a fairly young age. It wasn’t just about handing cash over and getting a thing in return. It was about the way a space feels and how you move through it, and influencing if someone goes into this store or that store.”

So often, this is where it starts. In the gestation of a career in the arts & design, the younger years provide insight into the purest form of what we love to do. For Eveleth, it was no different. The shop had its own “brand” and look & feel, its own line of clothing and exclusive items. He also had the opportunity to do the floor layouts, to understand what it meant to have a customer move through a space and experience Maine in a different way, and come in to buy a piece of the beautiful state to bring back home. He gained understanding of how to use space as a means of connecting with an audience.

TODAY

The physical retail experience as of today is in serious flux. Paradoxically, customers seek authenticity and intimacy with brands, yet getting them into a branded physical space is becoming harder and harder to do. The tombstones of empty malls across our national retail cemetery are a grim reminder that investment in the apparatus of sales is as seductive as it is tenuous. How big a space do you really need? What do you want people to do in it? More importantly, what do people actually want to do in your store?

Eveleth sees our National Parks system as a great example from which to learn. “National Parks do this so well, through interactive, educational programs. Fundamentally, they must prepare people [in order] to understand what they’re seeing and why it’s important. The experience is more than just getting on the bus and looking out the window. NPS has created an entire apparatus around learning about the environment and teaching visitors to organically move through it, not just observe it from a distance.”