As a 35-acre waterfront destination hosting over 700 companies across design, arts, tech, experience, and dining, Industry City stands as a premier hub for New York’s innovation economy and cultural programming.

Vision Creative Group (VCG), a technology and experience firm, acted as the social impact & public benefit experience bridge for community activity of SaaS product ACRYLICS.

Industry City sought to elevate cultural capital within the arts sector across Brooklyn and Manhattan while capturing consumer spend from NYCxDESIGN Week’s 300,000+ global festival participants. VCG placed an exclusive Wonderland experience within NYCxDesign’s print and interactive New York City map to boost IC Open Studios visibility.

The initiative included the release of an AR Mobile Storefront connection within the gallery activation, and a Metaverse Scavenger Hunt across the Industry City Campus and Open Studio points. VCG objective; test and validate Web3 feature integrations for augmented community engagement across variable test groups.

Complex Campus Wayfinding and Visitor Disorientation

Industry City's multi-building layout presents wayfinding hurdles for first-time festival visitors, risking reduced foot traffic for interior studios and peripheral tenants. Additionally, the activation required deploying complex Web3 features and interactive AR touchpoints to diverse event crowds without technical friction or onboarding bottlenecks.

Campus Visibility and Location Drop-Off

Beyond campus wayfinding hurdles the partnership faced intense competition from hundreds of citywide NYCxDESIGN events, alongside Industry City's geographic distance from main Manhattan transit lines. Capturing visitor footprint required cutting through an oversaturated festival schedule and actively incentivizing travel to the Southwest Brooklyn based campus.

Guided Wayfinding
To overcome transit barriers and festival competition, the teams secured boosted visibility within NYCxDESIGN's official promotional channels for cultural activations adjacent to retail and F&B tenants.

Boosted Visibility
This gave NYCxDESIGN clear directions to the campus, with the gamified Wonderland experience interactively routing festivalgoers across campus and directly into the AR Storefront to engage with featured artists.

Loyalty Leverage

Positioning the NYCxDesign and Open Studios as an organic opportunity for Industry City’s email and social media audience to partake in free cultural discovery activities, while tenants could capitalize and convert participant spillover into revenue.

While Wonderland established a baseline of 7,500 attendees across its multi-month run, the single day Open Studios window during the NYCxDesign Festival delivered an additional 2,500 visitors, generating over $50,000 in spillover F&B sales for the single day surge.

This traffic concentration successfully validated VCG's Web3 feature integrations testing for its SaaS, establishing feature roadmap baselines based on audience engagement.

As Senior Strategist – Consumer Experience, I provided executive leadership, strategic planning, and cross-functional team deployment to architect the Wonderland showcase in collaboration with Open Studios x NYCxDESIGN and cross-sector partners.

Applying business and marketing intelligence analysis, I led stakeholder alignment, co-creative strategy, and lifecycle promotional planning to elevate cultural relevance and drive measurable brand engagement across every touchpoint of the customer journey.