It’s Still Summer Somewhere

It’s always five o’clock somewhere; and it’s always summer in the immersive, experiential site, Endless Summer, by Richard Mille.

Back in October, the Swiss watchmaker launched the site to celebrate their season-bending capsule collection, boasting summer shades in an otherwise autumnal season. But we don’t ask questions of Richard Mille. They can do what they want…

The site is a tribute to the Memphis Design aesthetic and breathes fresh life into the dull, boring wasteland of the mobile web. When launched on a desktop computer, it asks you to resize the window to a vertical aspect ratio. When you do, the sun rises on the horizon in the scene, bathing the painterly beach-and-palm-tree-laden splash page in lavender and amber hues; then turquoise and aquamarine.

From there, you enter a training mode where the visitor is invited to explore the scene — a docked seaplane, then an outdoor market — before embarking on a Myst-style adventure with clues, puzzles, overheard conversations, and easter eggs. It feels at once new and nostalgic.

Built by French creative agency Magnetism, the sleeper site was built on Next.js and Three.js in time for the Readymag CSS Design Awards but received little fanfare until now. At the helm of the project were creative developers Ludovic Boiteux (Daniel Roth, Paris Entertainment Company), Jameen Tarlier (L’Oreal, Louis Vuitton), and Elisa Dubois (Nespresso Agit, Adidas Arena).

“I actually felt joy,” said a Future Commerce subscriber in a private DM. “This is what every brand should be doing.”

Richard Mille is not every brand. Few brands would go to these lengths to create experiential support of a product launch off-season; fewer still have products priced in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. The hero product and tribute of the Endless Summer site experience, the RM 07-01 Coloured Ceramics, has a street price of $205,000 USD.

If you can afford the RM 07-01, you can afford to seek out Summer, wherever it is, and whenever you want. 

For the rest of us, we can approximate that feeling by visiting endless-summer.richardmille.com

— Phillip

P.S. We’re less than two weeks away from our momentous event at Miami Art Week, during Art Basel Miami Beach! Experience art and commerce collide at MUSES by Future Commerce. Join the waitlist at futurecommerce.com/muses.

‍P.P.S. Do you tip for counter service? How about at the self-checkout? Do you have media consumption guilt? These are the subjects of this week’s After Dark, a bonus content series for subscribers of Future Commerce Plus. Not a member yet? No problem, get the teaser to whet your appetite over at Apple Podcast and Spotify.