04.28.09
Hair Care Packaging with Style
Carefully considered packaging shapes and unified color schemes prove effective when it comes to best-dressed tress appeal.
By Joanna Cosgrove, Online Editor
According to Dan Snyder, design director, TricorBraun Design Group, Elmhurst, IL, the current hair care market is traveling at many different levels of visual complexity. “Many mass market products are trying to highlight their brands, with little success, using overdone graphics and color,” he says. “Although in a standalone situation the product may look good, once collectively aligned in a mass market retail environment, next to competitors, the assembled color stream of graphics and labels become an eclectic mess of scattered, overdone products with nothing really standing out.”
At the other end of the hair care packaging spectrum, a number of well-known salon brand names have remained in the same stock type packaging for many years using basic single one- or two-color scheme graphics applications to highlight the brand names on the package’s front panel. “These brands tend to rely on sheer shelf space and volume in the aisle or end cap to draw attention,” adds Snyder. “A four- foot wide, top-to-bottom row of silver or white can be impressive…if the brand’s already well-known.”
While color defines some brands, others are choosing to rely on package shape for brand recognition.
“Our philosophy really is branding by shape,” explains Snyder. “Take away the colors. Take away the graphics …do you know whose package it is? That’s the question we try and respond to with each and every brand—looking for an identity. When we are done with the project, the answer to that question should be a resounding YES!”
TricorBraun recently worked with Tim Schaeffer, co-founder of Petaluma, CA-based Depth Body, to build an identity for his brand. “With a background in marine biology, Tim’s organic brand image needed to represent what the product stood for,” recalls Snyder. “With ingredients like organic aloe and leaf juice, we needed to convey that message in the form of the bottle shape.”
Using Depth Body’s tag line, “Live Beneath the Surface” as its inspiration, TricorBraun created a soft, organic tottle design with subtle but clear form shifts that mimic the leaf-like shape of marine kelp. “Wiping a clean front and back panel for deco through the revolved leaf shape we created a collective POP display when rowed two or three across together,” says Snyder. “The refined tip, again shaped after the kelp leaf, allowed for a long organic transition from the lower bulb pod shape to the cleanly refined tip of the bottle.”
Shape was also a top consideration for Dallas, TX-based Fusion Packaging when it helped Liquid Keratin of Ontario, Canada, design the packaging for its new line of hair care products. “We took a stock bottle and expanded the line to accommodate all the sizes needed,” explains Lesley Gadomski, sales manager for Fusion Packaging. “Custom bottles with continuous thread finishes were created to house the spray and pump products. The overcaps were tooled in Fusion’s China facility in order to keep mold costs at a minimum, but to maintain the flush teardrop shape with the bottle and cap.
The line’s aesthetic was born out of Liquid Keratin’s teardrop-shaped logo. The resulting teardrop-shaped HDPE bottles were decorated with both hot stamp and silk screen and topped with PP dispensing closures. “Since the bottles are such a unique shape, available decoration area was a challenge,” says Gadomski. “All the bottles in the line include a large hot stamp logo, which runs vertically up the side of the bottles. It took careful engineering to ensure the hot stamp would be applied perfectly, as the hot stamp runs 4.5 inches up the side of the bottle on some SKUs.”
Liquid Keratin launched seven SKUs spanning a shampoo, conditioner, treatment, serum and leave-in conditioner in January 2009, and is sold in salons nationwide as well as on the Home Shopping Network.
The result was a custom bottle lineup ranging in size from six ounces to 12 ounces. “Each was made from high-density polyethylene which is the second most recycled material,” notes DiMaggio. “All the closures are polypropylene, the third most recycled [material].”
DiMaggio explains that Continental Packaging Solutions worked closely with the Samy design team to come up with designs that were ergonomic and also manufacturable. “Creating the angled tottle was a challenge as the corners had to be equally as strong as the sidewalls. Making a few design adaptations to the tooling corrected this issue,” she says. “We also worked to create a unique ball top that looks great and is very functional, instead of unscrewing the cap, simply pull/push to close.”
From Simple to Ornate
New York-based Zorbit Resources is skilled in creating both simple and elaborate packaging configurations, and nowhere is this depth more evident than in its recent hair care product endeavors for celebrity hair stylists Sally Hershberger and Oribe.
“As one of the most famous, influential, and sought after hair stylists in the entertainment industry, Sally’s hair care line hoped to achieve an aesthetic on par with her celebrity persona,” says Zorbit’s Scott Kestenbaum vice president, marketing. Though the line’s color palette of pink, gold, green and pewter seems like a loud choice, it is, in actuality, a graphically sophisticated nod to POP art.
As for Oribe, Kestenbaum says the stylist was looking to create a striking brand identity that was equal parts classic and modern. “The goal for it was to feel like it has always been there, a symbiosis of old heritage and modernity with an edge,” he says.
While the structural architecture of the Sally Hershberger line appears fairly conventional, Zorbit custom molded 100% of the bottles and jars for the brand’s launch. “The distinctive custom colors and three pass registered silk screen dictated that we molded and decorated all of the packaging under one roof,” says Kestenbaum. “This, combined with the addition of gold aluminum overshell caps really makes the line feel like expensive fine art.”
The Oribe line, which consists of 22 individual SKUs over eight forms, was also custom molded. Zorbit built 19 precision multi-cavity custom tools for the launch. Each package is embossed with an Oribe crest.
Heavy walled, injection-molded PCTA jars feature two-piece constructions for both the lid and the base. In order to achieve the designer’s ultra low profile lid, Zorbit created a unique patent-pending industrial design feature whereby the thread profile is hidden and inset into the jar wall cavity.
“The jars/caps used to package the special pomade product formulations were then vacuum metallized in a ‘Rolex’ gold and ‘smokey’ chrome,” says Kestenbaum. “All components then received a two-pass hot stamp deco and bottom pad print.”
Due to the unique shape of the faceted design, Zorbit used PETG to mold the tottles. “PETG was chosen because of its semi-rigid properties that would support the structure of the facets without compromising the flexibility needed to fully evacuate the product,” he says. The complex contour of the tottle surface, however, proved challenging during the hot stamping process. Kestenbaum says the company’s creative team circumvented the issue by manipulating the text so that it could be applied flat over the contour.
Capping off the Oribe tottles is a “first ever” low profile, weighted-hinge cap. A snap fitment for the cap was engineered because of a space constraint required of a normal threaded neck finish.
From the sublime to the fanciful, hair care product marketers are coming to rely on the bones of their packaging—bottle, jars and tottles—to connect with the consumers on shelf.
