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Bai x Sydney Sweeney at LUME Studios
Bai kicked off its new campaign with Sydney Sweeney by transforming LUME Studios into a vibrant, nature-inspired brand environment. Guests entered through a pathway surrounded by lush greenery, fruit trees, and product moments that brought Bai’s WonderWater concept to life in a fresh and interactive way. Spatial audio was used to create a dynamic ever changing auditory world throughout each area of the space.
The event blended thoughtful design with light brand storytelling, giving attendees a relaxed space to connect with the product, the campaign, and each other in the heart of downtown NYC.The event leveraged LUME's 360 degree projection system to transform the space with Bai's brand palette and visual identity, creating a shareable, content-rich environment that resonated across social media long after the event ended.
Bai approached the launch of its Raspberry Lemon Lime flavor with a clear constraint: this would not be a public-facing activation. The audience was editorial, fashion press, lifestyle press, beverage trade, and the goal was earned media coverage, not foot traffic.
The flavor itself was personal. It drew on Sydney Sweeney's berry-picking memories from the Pacific Northwest, where she grew up. The concept LUME built around it was the Raspberry Lemon Lime Grove with Sydney Sweeney, a physical environment that translated that origin story into a space worth photographing, with every sightline engineered for the press images that would carry the campaign in the weeks that followed.
The hook of the activation was seasonal contrast. The press preview took place in early March in New York City, the dead of winter, cold and gray. The environment had to feel like late summer in a Pacific Northwest berry field. The room needed to convince editors walking in from the cold that they had walked into June.
The campaign tagline was Bai. It's WonderWater. The setting needed to live up to it.
The build took three days of load-in at 393 Broadway. The storefront marquee, ground floor, and interview area of LUME Studios were transformed into the Raspberry Lemon Lime Grove, a fully immersive WonderWater environment that extended from the Broadway-facing facade through the interior of the space.
LUME's permanent street marquee at 393 Broadway anchored the activation. LUME's production team coordinated the fabrication of the custom acrylic pieces for the marquee, dressing the building's exterior with the campaign's Raspberry Lemon Lime Grove with Sydney Sweeney identity. The marquee functioned as the first impression for every editor walking up to the door, and as a piece of branded outdoor signage that lived through the press window.
LUME designed and built the grove itself. The treatment extended raspberry vines onto the exterior of the building, took over the storefront windows with crated product arrangements at eye level, and built an interior grove of lemon and lime trees with raspberry vines threaded throughout. A dedicated wooden pergola structure served as the interview nook, a vine-covered seating environment where Sweeney engaged with press one-on-one.
The full environmental design was built to override the season outside. Live and faux plants, lemon and lime trees in fruit, raspberry vines, turf laid wall-to-wall, every surface in the room replaced the Manhattan winter with a Pacific Northwest berry field. By the time press cleared the entryway and reached the grove, the outside world was gone.
LUME's projection team designed a moving sunlight effect across the interview nook, projected light filtering through the canopy of trees and casting shifting shadows across the seating area. The effect gave the indoor grove the feeling of an outdoor environment in motion, with the light shifting as if a real sun were moving across a real afternoon. Across the broader space, projection content reinforced the WonderWater visual identity.
The 17-speaker JBL system divided the room into distinct auditory zones. LUME's sound team curated a custom soundscape of birdsong, wind through trees, and natural ambient textures, different sounds positioned in different parts of the grove, so guests moving from the storefront through the interior heard the field shift around them. The audio worked with the projection and the fabrication to complete the seasonal illusion: a real Pacific Northwest grove in sound as well as sight.
Lighting was tuned for two simultaneous purposes: the live press experience inside the room, and the photography that would be pulled from it. Press photographers needed flattering light for Sweeney's appearances and product moments. The grove needed warmth. Both were balanced through the lighting plot.
All systems, projection content, spatial audio zones, lighting cues, live audio for Sweeney's flavor reveal, were integrated and operated from LUME's in-house production stack.
The event itself was invite-only. Editors, lifestyle press, and brand partners.
WWD described the environment as “a faux grove of lemon and lime trees.”
The press preview generated coverage across the Bai campaign's primary audience. WWD published a full feature with on-the-scene photography. The Knockturnal ran an on-the-scene exclusive, capturing Sweeney's direct quote on the flavor's origin: “It stemmed from my love of berry picking when I grew up, in the pacific northwest. So we've built, kind of like my childhood memories, here!”
Sweeney appeared in a pleated deep-pink Alaïa maxidress, matched to the flavor's color. The room, designed for capture, engineered to feel like summer, delivered the imagery the campaign needed to carry past the closing of the doors.
LUME Studios is a brand activation agency and event production company at 393 Broadway, New York.
Photo + video
LUME covers events with photo and video from one team: same-day selects for social, a full edited gallery after, and recap films cut for where they will be posted. At 393 Broadway or at your venue.
Tell us the goal, the guest count, and where it needs to happen. We reply within one business day with the right venue or production path.
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