The first Experience Design mission ever curated
Seven days inside the China nobody visits. Zhang Yimou's outdoor shows. The stores that became installations. The largest indoor forest in the world. Brazil looks to Silicon Valley for creative inspiration. It's looking the wrong way.
Tell me more →Why this mission exists
Every existing China mission — StartSe, ABES, Caldeira, Bittencourt, Gouvêa — visits Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, Huawei, industrial Shenzhen. This is the first one going to the human, sensory, emotional side of what China is producing. For shows, museums, experiential retail, brand activations, radical hospitality.
Over the past five years, the creative frontier of retail, hospitality and immersive events has migrated. Brands like Louis Vuitton, Chanel, Bottega Veneta choose Shanghai over New York for their most radical installations. When you design experience looking only at Europe or the US, you're staring into a five-year-old mirror.
Other missions do site visits, lectures and networking. Here you toboggan down the Great Wall. You sit in Zhang Yimou's audience and feel scents synchronized to each scene. You walk inside the Louis Vuitton ship in Shanghai. You don't OBSERVE experience design. You PASS THROUGH it.
StartSe, Caldeira, Bittencourt, ABES, Gouvêa — all focus on e-commerce, AI, industry, energy. None offer an immersion dedicated to in-person experience design, experiential retail and live entertainment at Chinese scale. This gap is not coincidence. It's a window.
Rodrigo Martins, founder of Nuts, curated the route after living it personally. Every visit is stitched to an Experience Design concept. Mornings are free for individual discovery. Afternoons are guided. Evenings, small-group debriefings where we extract practical application for your business.
Post-Golden Week, low tourist density, mild weather in every city, golden autumn in Beijing, and Hangzhou's lake spectacles at their peak. February shuts everything down (Spring Festival). July-August is unbearable heat. October is the window.
What you'll experience
Directed spectacle · Zhang Yimou
Open-air spectacle over West Lake, directed by the filmmaker of the Olympic Games. Neckpieces release scents synchronized with each scene. Ambient opera at impossible scale — a global benchmark for anyone designing multisensory experience.
Luxury retail as installation · Shanghai
Louis Vuitton store shaped like a monumental ocean liner, in the heart of Shanghai. The world's biggest brands (LV, Chanel, Bottega) choose Shanghai over NY or Paris for their most radical installations. Branded experience as civic architecture.
When the brand forgets the product · Gentle Monster
Hyper-realistic humanoids, scenography that changes every season, eyewear as pretext. The gallery-store that repositioned the entire eyewear category across Asia. A direct lesson for any brand still treating its store as a point of sale.
Where shopping and entertainment converge · Chongqing
The Ring: a shopping mall with a 7-floor, 42-meter-tall tropical forest inside — 6,000 m² and 300 species. Not a mall with landscaping. A biome where retail happens. It rewrites what a family weekend destination can be — and what trade marketing means.
When shopping becomes cultural rite · Beijing
Parkview Green: the largest private Salvador Dalí collection outside Barcelona, sculptures suspended in the atrium, a LEED Platinum pyramid building. Shopping stops being a transaction and becomes a cultural journey — a direct model for any flagship store or brand emporium.
Biome as narrative, not as set design · Shanghai
Futuristic plant museum in Shanghai. Light domes, natural scenography, impossible integration between architecture and ecosystem. A reference for anyone designing corporate HQ, hospitality, or brand environments where space needs to tell a story without saying a word.
Design begins before the brand · Education
Preschool children start the day with a collective choreographed warm-up. Experience design permeates Chinese daily life as ritual — not as marketing tool, but as cultural structure. The question that returns to you: which rituals in your company deserve that kind of intention?
Natural heritage × digital cinema · Hangzhou
You enter a real cave by boat. Stone becomes screen. Mapped cinema layers over natural heritage without competing with it. A lesson for any activation that has to invite technology without killing the place.
Repositioned heritage · Mutianyu
A two-thousand-year-old wall became a ride. Without irony, without shallow touristification — a serious reinterpretation of how historic assets can be repositioned as experience without losing density. The perfect example of the turn from "Made in China" to "Designed in China".
Preliminary program
Free mornings for personal discovery, guided afternoons with authorial curation, evenings with small-group debriefings. Not a tourist itinerary. Not corporate benchmarking. Method-driven immersion.
Who leads
Founder & CEO
17 years designing corporate experiences for TIM, JBS, Renner, Itaú Social and Catupiry. Thesis: real impact doesn't live in the event — it starts in the construction process. Theater background, alumnus of Ricardo Semler's Instituto DNA Brasil, creator of Festival CTRL > CLTR.
Director
Director at Nuts and winner of the Rising Star award in Experience Design. Leads method application in projects of high cultural and brand impact. Sharp eye for sensory detail and journey construction — exactly the kind of reading this mission demands.
Accompanied on the ground in every city by a handpicked team of experience designers from Nuts. You don't go alone — you go with curation, context, and people who know how to read what they're seeing.
Who it's for
For people who design experience as a strategic asset — regardless of the title on the badge.
Honesty first: if the mission isn't for you, better to know now.
Expression of interest
Fill in the form below. Over the next few weeks, you'll receive the detailed program, the investment, and the priority registration window. No commercial agenda. No sales pitch. Just real conversation.
We'll be in touch in a few days with more details about the mission. Have a good evening.