Case Study: Telstra
Designing Calm & Focus in Retail with Mood-as-a-Service™
Telstra partnered with Auric Spaces, our enterprise scent-intelligence platform, to explore whether emotional design — delivered through smart, AI-powered scent — could measurably improve the customer and staff experience across its retail network.
What began as a creative experiment in one store evolved into a multi-state deployment across five regions, validating Auric Spaces as a scalable Mood-as-a-Service™ system for enterprise environments.
Challenge
Redesigning the Emotional Layer of Retail
Telstra’s brief was focused and ambitious:
Could mood, specifically Calm and Focus be intentionally engineered in-store to improve clarity, comfort, and the quality of customer interactions?
They were not seeking fragrance.
They were testing whether emotional experience could become a designed, measurable asset across the business.
What Auric Spaces Delivered
1. Proprietary Emotional Scent Territories
Auric developed a suite of scent territories aligned to Calm and Focus, using our ritual-based methodology, volatility mapping, and therapeutic essential oil profiles.
Names and formulations remain part of Auric’s IP roadmap.
2. Behavioural Test & Learn Program
A multi-week evaluation cycle analysed:
- emotional impact
- staff feedback
- dwell-pattern behaviour
- scent intensity curves
- zone-map logic
3. Immersive Store-Lab Integration
Inside Telstra’s Melbourne retail lab, Auric Spaces collaborated with lighting, retail design, and brand experience teams to create a fully integrated sensory prototype.
Scent, light, and spatial design were synchronised to deliver a unified emotional experience — a hallmark capability of Auric Spaces.
National Rollout
Mood-as-a-Service™ Across Australia
Following the success of the Melbourne lab trial, Telstra expanded Auric’s scent-intelligent system into a national, multi-state rollout. Auric Spaces is now active across five Australian states, steadily becoming part of the retail experience for customers nationwide.
This expansion demonstrates that intelligent scent can be delivered consistently, reliably, and at scale — seamlessly integrated into daily retail operations, staff workflows, and Telstra’s broader customer-experience vision.
Mood-as-a-Service™ is no longer a concept.
It’s a national program reaching more Australians every month — and it’s just getting started.
Results
Emotional Clarity at Scale
Auric Spaces created:
- A calmer, more grounded environment during peak periods
- Better customer clarity during decision-making
- Improved staff focus and experience
- AI-optimised scent delivery that adapts throughout the day
- Predictive Smart Cap telemetry for refill planning and network-level efficiency
The outcome is emotional design as an operational advantage.
Why It Worked
Creative ROI
Telstra evaluated success through emotional performance, not aesthetics:
- Does the space feel calmer when it matters most?
- Are customers more comfortable and decisive?
- Do staff feel supported by the environment?
- Is the sensory experience consistent across the network?
Auric Spaces delivered on all fronts proving that intelligent scent is a behavioural design tool with measurable creative ROI.
