Yan Ji You turns bookstore shelves into a sculpture guessing game

Yan Ji You needed an in-store idea that expressed its 'unique reading philosophy' rather than simply promoting discounts. The constraint was to make browsing feel participatory inside a physical bookstore.

Build surreal 3D scenes from eight bestselling books and make shoppers guess the titles before buying.

The Nine Shanghai selected eight bestseller types and recreated classic scenes as striking shelf installations, from Kafka's bed-bound insect to the wolf in the chimney from The Three Little Pigs. Shoppers used visual hints to guess titles and earn discounts.

The work won ADFEST Design Gold and a 2022 One Show Design Merit, turning ordinary shelves into a repeatable retail experience.

Guess Which Book Is It? treated the bookstore shelf as media. Instead of posters about reading, Yan Ji You and The Nine Shanghai turned bestsellers into physical riddles that could only be solved by looking closely.

The installations borrowed scenes from familiar books: Kafka's transformed insect in bed, the Big Bad Wolf stuck in a chimney, Houdini-like escape imagery and other sculptural clues. The shopper's reward was simple, a discount for identifying the book.

The idea traveled through award archives because the craft carried the strategy. ADFEST listed it as Ambient: Small Scale; One Show placed it under Design, Promotional Collateral, and awarded it a Merit.

The sculptures made browsing active instead of passive.

The clue format linked discounting to literary knowledge, not price shouting.

The campaign gave the bookstore an ownable in-store behavior.

The craft was strong enough to be judged as both ambient media and design.

Retail displays can do more than decorate: when they encode a small puzzle, they slow shoppers down and make product discovery feel earned.

The project kept appearing across creative-award records after the store activation, including ADFEST 2022 and The One Show 2022. It also reinforced The Nine Shanghai's reputation for turning Chinese retail environments into participatory design pieces.