How do you sell someone a luxury condo — in a building that doesn’t exist yet?
Same way you roll out a retail concept across 1,200 T-Mobile stores. Same way you turn Eddie Bauer’s forgotten archive into a museum. Same way you keep Tommy Bahama’s brand feeling premium when a $50 beach chair is available at Costco.
You make people feel something in a physical space.
Lane Tollefsen has been doing exactly that for 23 years — across advertising, retail, hospitality, and luxury real estate. She’s the Creative Director of CLAY, an in-house agency built out of the need for an elevated luxury offering within Realogics Sotheby’s International Realty.
Before that, she led design at Tommy Bahama across every brand touchpoint for eight years.
And before that, she was designing retail executions at WongDoody for clients like T-Mobile, and Alaska Airlines.
“I’m still placemaking,” Tollefsen says. “I’m just doing it in different industries.”
The details of her career are impressive. But the takeaways are what matter — because the same thinking that sells a luxury residence on a building that doesn’t exist can make your next retail rollout hit harder.
Before You Design Anything, Ask Why Anyone Should Care
Tollefsen credits her entire creative philosophy to her first creative director who taught her to interrogate every project before executing it.
“Why does it exist? Why are we doing this? Who are we doing it for? Why do they care? What takes something mundane and makes it relevant?”
That’s not abstract thinking. That’s practical discipline. And it’s a habit Tollefsen takes seriously — to the point where it bleeds into her personal life. “My partner hates it,” she says. “He’s like, you ask so many questions.”
But that instinct is exactly what’s carried her across industries. She doesn’t need to be a subject-matter expert in real estate, or tropical fashion, or outdoor heritage gear. She needs to understand what will make someone care. “You should be able to sell anything,” she says. “You don’t necessarily have to assume it to be able to sell it.”
When you’re deep in production timelines and someone just needs the files, stopping to question the brief feels like a luxury. Tollefsen argues it’s the opposite — it’s the step that separates work that fills a space from work that transforms it.
Tollefsen’s Takeaway: Before you spec materials or build out a floorplan, ask who’s walking into that space and why they should care. The “why” drives every decision downstream — from substrate choices to spatial flow. Skip it, and you’re decorating. Nail it, and you’re creating an experience.
Design the Dream First. Scale Second.
At WongDoody, Tollefsen’s job was to take a single retail concept and scale it across wildly inconsistent store formats. For T-Mobile alone, that meant 1,200+ locations at the time.
“We’d design for the best-case scenario,” she explains, “and then we’d edit it for all the other stores that either only had one window, or no fixtures.”
One concept. Dozens of variables. The flagship gets the full expression. The mall kiosk gets the distilled version. But both need to land.
This is a principle anyone managing multi-location rollouts lives by — but Tollefsen frames it as a creative strategy, not just a logistics problem. You don’t start with the constraints. You start with the vision, then build a system that degrades gracefully.
Tollefsen’s Takeaway: Don’t design to the lowest common denominator. Design the ideal execution first. Then create a modular system that scales. The best-case version sets the ceiling. Everything else adapts from there.
Brand Consistency Is a Storytelling Problem — Not a Policing Problem
At Tommy Bahama, Tollefsen worked to design consistency everywhere — across retail stores, restaurants, bars, a rum brand, licensing, wholesale, and a website.
That’s a massive surface area for brand dilution. A $200 camp shirt in the flagship store. A $50 branded chair at Costco. A taco bar in a beach town. How do you keep that cohesive?
“Not everybody wants to wear tropical clothing,” Tollefsen says bluntly. The brand happened to catch a cultural moment during her tenure — the camp shirt ended up on the cover of Vogue — but the fundamental challenge never went away. “How do we become relevant in every household when we’re very much niche?”
Her approach was top-down creative planning. Working almost a year in advance. Brainstorming with apparel, retail ops and merchandising. Developing three creative concepts. Landing on one. Then mapping how it showed up at every touchpoint — getting production partners involved early to figure out how the concept could be manufactured at a retail level and scaled across 100+ stores.
“It takes a lot of pre-planning and 30,000-foot thinking to get all those pieces aligned,” she says.
Tollefsen’s Takeaway: Brand consistency doesn’t come from stricter guidelines. It comes from a unified creative vision that’s established before anyone starts producing assets.
If you’re working on branded environments, your job isn’t just executing a look. It’s understanding the story behind it — so every touchpoint feels intentional, not accidental. And if you can get involved in that upstream conversation? Do it.
Don't Tell Your Brand's Story. Build It.
After the 2009 downturn, Tollefsen took a freelance role at Eddie Bauer to design their heritage room — a museum-style installation inside the corporate headquarters.
Eddie Bauer had a full-time archivist maintaining decades of product history. Everest expedition suits from the 1930s. Early iterations of jackets. All sitting in storage.
The challenge: Turn that archive into a brand experience that made visitors — potential partners, potential hires — feel the weight of that legacy.
Tollefsen partnered with the archivist and marketing to build a walkable narrative. Dressed mannequins. Supporting graphics. A storyline that guided visitors through the space. “We created narratives around how to tell that story,” she says, “what that should feel like, what the user experience should be.”
It took a year. And it worked — because it wasn’t a display. It was an environment. The tactile presence of historical garments, the pacing of a curated walk-through, the emotional resonance of seeing a brand’s origin in three dimensions — that’s something a website will never replicate.
Tollefsen’s Takeaway: Every brand has a story. Most brands shove it into an “About Us” page. The brands that win turn it into something spatial — something you walk through, touch, stand inside. If you’re in EGD, you already know this. But it’s worth remembering: the more physical you can make a brand’s history feel, the deeper it lands.
How to Build a Memorable Place That Doesn't Exist Yet
This is the one that stops people.
At Sotheby’s, Tollefsen built Clay to solve brand consistency problems across the brokerage. But the new development work is where her placemaking instincts go furthest.
She was selling condominiums in a luxury high-rise that was two years from completion. Buyers were putting down large deposits. On a building that wasn’t there.
“There’s no building to sell,” Tollefsen says. “I can’t take pictures and put it on something. I have to invent the idea of a place.”
The solution: Send a drone up to the altitude of each future floor and capture 360-degree photography of the views from those heights. Then line the walls of a windowless sales center with those panoramic images, printed on Duratrans and backlit.
“When you walked into this room with no windows, it looked like you were standing on the 35th floor of a tower and looking out the window,” she says. “You went to the kitchen in this mock space and you were looking out the kitchen window. You went to the bedroom and you had the view from the bedroom window. Everything was photographically lit, so it felt like you could reach through that false wall.“
Not a rendering. Not a slideshow. An immersive, environmental experience — built entirely with printed graphics and smart lighting.
“How do you evoke that sense of a person experiencing something,” Tollefsen asks, “even if it’s a flat surface?”
That question is the essence of what environmental graphic design can do when it’s driven by creative problem-solving rather than just execution. The buyers weren’t looking at a brochure. They were standing inside the life they were being asked to invest in.
Tollefsen’s Takeaway: Environmental graphic design isn’t just about enhancing existing spaces. It can create them. If you can make someone feel like they’re standing on the 35th floor of a building that doesn’t exist, you can make them feel anything. The tools are the same — substrates, lighting, photography, spatial design. The ambition is what changes.
Your Vendor Network Is a Creative Asset
One more thread runs through Tollefsen’s two decades of work: the importance of who’s in your corner when it’s time to execute.
She doesn’t keep a rotating roster. She works with about five vendors. And she’s been working with them for 15 years.
“I found people that share the same ideals as myself,” she says, “and you hold on to those people.”
In a world where new companies spin up overnight and quality is a gamble, Tollefsen sees those long-term partnerships as non-negotiable — particularly for anything involving physical installation or production quality. “It’s a lot to weed through to know who’s legit and who isn’t,” she says. “And those that are legit don’t exist in very many places anymore.”
Tollefsen’s Takeaway: The best creative work means nothing if it’s produced or installed poorly. Your vendor relationships aren’t overhead — they’re infrastructure. Find partners who care about craft as much as you do, and keep them close.
Different Industries, Same Creative Muscle
Many creatives stay in one lane. Tollefsen has crossed four industries — and the lesson she keeps proving is simple:
Placemaking is placemaking.
The skills that make a T-Mobile rollout feel cohesive across 1,200 doors are the same skills that make a luxury sales center feel real before the building exists. The process that keeps Tommy Bahama’s brand consistent across restaurants, retail, and Costco is the same process that turns a corporate archive into a museum.
Ask why first. Design from the top down. Make it experiential. And surround yourself with partners who can execute at the level your ideas demand.
You've Got the Vision. Now You Need the Execution.
Whether you’re scaling a retail rollout across hundreds of doors, building an immersive sales environment from the ground up, or creating a one-of-a-kind installation that tells your brand’s story — the right production and installation partner makes all the difference.
SuperGraphics has been that partner for brands like Lane’s for over 35 years — delivering large-format printing, environmental graphics, and nationwide installation with the precision, quality, and white-glove service that high-stakes branded environments demand.
