The Context
An Industry In Crisis.
By 2022, the American auto industry had been turned upside down. The pandemic had shuttered showrooms and trained a generation of buyers to expect frictionless online transactions. Carvana — with its glass-tower car vending machines and zero-dealership model — had become the symbol of the industry's fear: that people would rather buy a car from a machine than deal with a salesperson.
Celebration Chevrolet, formerly Bozarth Chevrolet, didn't respond by going fully digital. They went experiential. Under a new brand identity built around the motto "Fast, Fun, and Easy," they recognized that Fast and Easy were solvable. Fun required a different kind of partner.
They called Alt Ethos.
"They didn't just need a design. They needed to know which direction to walk."
The Space — Before
The Celebration Room — Floor Plan
The Brief
Transform the Most Important Moment of the Sale.
Buying a car is one of the most significant purchases a person makes. Yet the delivery moment — when a customer finally gets their keys — had never been given a stage. A handshake. Some paperwork. A drive out of a parking lot.
Celebration Chevrolet had an underutilized office hallway and repair center hub at their Aurora location. The brief: transform it into an immersive show where customers are celebrated with a personalized experience starring their new car. Generate word-of-mouth. Create a reason to choose Celebration Chevrolet over every alternative — including the vending machine.
Alt Ethos conducted a full design study — site visit, stakeholder discovery, inspiration boards, concept development, technical assessment, and a multi-package budget framework — before a single piece of equipment was specified.
What the Design Study Revealed
The Full 360.
A design study isn't a mood board and a concept render. It's a complete picture — creative, technical, financial, and strategic — so that a client can make a fully informed decision. Here is what this one delivered.
The Creative Concept
A Fully Realized Experience
Alt Ethos designed the complete experience: a branded hallway approach with personalized questions, a key reveal that triggers the show, a 2–5 minute personalized projection and lighting performance, an automated photo moment emailed to the customer, and a garage door finale where the customer drives out into the world. The concept was production-ready.
The Technical Picture
Nothing Left to Discover
Every technical variable was documented before production: 18,144 watts of total power load, 12 projectors, full truss system specifications, dual-zone spatial audio, drop ceiling removal requirements, ADA ramp design, cable management, and a 3-year maintenance warranty structure. No surprises on installation day.
The Budget Architecture
Multiple Paths, One Standard
Alt Ethos presented tiered Rough Order of Magnitude pricing — from a skinned existing show control application to a fully custom-built interface — so the client could choose their investment level with full visibility into what each path included. Quality held constant across every option. Only the investment scale changed.
The Industry Context
A Client Already Asking the Right Questions
Celebration Chevrolet didn't wait for the industry to tell them what to do. They saw the shift in consumer behavior, made the decision to rebrand, and came to Alt Ethos with a clear direction: make the physical experience worth having. That kind of client — self-aware, decisive, already pivoting — is the best kind to design for.
The Full Picture
Everything a Client Needs to Move Forward
Facility modifications. Power infrastructure. Drop ceiling removal. ADA access. Ongoing maintenance. Staff training. Full budget architecture at multiple investment levels. This design phase left nothing for a client to discover later — because a decision made with complete information is always a better decision. That's the standard Alt Ethos holds on every engagement.
The Outcome
Clarity Beats a Beautiful Concept
The client chose to direct their resources toward the at-home customer experience instead. That was the right call for their market, their customer, and their moment. Alt Ethos helped them see it — not by building something, but by making the full picture visible. The design phase paid for itself before a single piece of equipment was ordered.
The Designed Experience
Five Minutes.
Unforgettable.
The designed experience runs in three acts across two spaces, controlled by a single iPad in a staff member's hand.
The Approach — Hallway
A Product Specialist guides the customer to a touch panel at the hallway entrance. Simple personalization questions. The door illuminates. Ambient music and LED lighting begin as they walk the path — anticipation building with every step.
The Reveal — Celebration Room
The room is dark. A single spotlight falls on a white pedestal holding a glowing Celebration Chevrolet box. The customer opens the box. Inside: their keys. They pick them up. The room activates.
The Show
Moving stage lights spotlight their car. The Celebration Chevrolet logo — projected via custom gobo — sweeps the walls. A 2–5 minute personalized projection mapping show unfolds across every surface. Their car. Their colors. Their moment.
The Photo Moment
A voice prompt invites the customer to stand in front of their vehicle. The photo is taken automatically and emailed directly to them — with the car, the light, the moment. A piece of content ready to be shared before they even leave the lot.
The Finale
The customer gets in the car. The Celebration song plays. A final show projects onto the garage door — a perspective drive down an open road — then the door rises. They drive out into the world. The most cinematic exit in the Colorado auto industry.
Concept Storyboard — The Show
Celebration Room — Projection Concept, Alt Ethos 2022
The Approach
Multiple Paths.
One Standard of Quality.
Design phases are intentionally affordable. They exist to protect clients from the most expensive mistake in experiential design: building the wrong thing. A full design study — site visit, discovery, concepting, technical assessment — costs a fraction of production and can save multiples of that in avoided missteps.
Alt Ethos presented Celebration Chevrolet with multiple budget packages — from a skinned existing show control application to a fully custom-built interface — so that the client could make an informed production decision with full visibility into costs and tradeoffs. Every package met the same creative standard. The variable was investment level, not quality.
The design also accounted for the full facility picture: power load, truss engineering, drop ceiling removal, ADA accessibility, cable management, and a 3-year maintenance warranty — nothing left for a contractor to discover on installation day.