The File: Cosmetic - Reaching New Heights
FlowerbyKenzo unites natural beauty and contemporary architecture, elevating package design to a higher level.
To package FlowerbyKenzo, a floral fragrance for women, Kenzo Parfums (Paris) designed fragrance bottles that combine the natural beauty of a budding flower with the human-made beauty of a skyscraper. "The designs were inspired by contemporary architecture," says Isabelle Lazarus, public relations executive for Kenzo Parfums. "Smooth and sleek [like tall buildings], the bottles also have a subtle curve that evokes the image of a flower's stem."
The 30-, 50-, and 100-ml bottles are modeled with the same basic cylindrical shape, but with slight nuances in contour and decoration. "The three bottles each represent a stage of the blooming of the flower," says Lazarus.
The designs—created collaboratively by AIR, an advertising agency based in Paris, and French artist Serge Mansau, who had previously designed other fragrance bottles for Kenzo Parfums—were presented to bottle supplier Saint-Gobain Desjonquères (Paris) in March 2000.
Saint-Gobain Desjonquères blow-molded the glass bottles according to Kenzo Parfums' design specifications. "The bottles were extremely difficult to produce because of their glass distribution," says Thierry Le Goff, vice president of marketing at Saint-Gobain Desjonquères. The bottles had to be engineered so that they would remain stable when placed on a conveyor belt.
Kenzo Parfums also provided Saint-Gobain Desjonquères with serigraphs of the poppy stem design. Saint-Gobain Desjonquères silk-screened the design onto the bottles using four colors.
Several production challenges arose during the printing process. "Keeping a good registration of the different colors [when printing the stem] was difficult," says Le Goff. Saint-Gobain Desjonquères solved the problem by performing numerical registration using their silk-screening machines.
Matching the silk-screened decoration on the bottles to that on the caps was also an achievement. "The stem on the bottle had to line up precisely with [its continuation] on the cap, to give the impression of a single stem," says Le Goff. In addition, the color of the stem needed to be identical on both the bottles and the caps.
Cap supplier Qualipac (Neuilly, France) applied the poppy design to the outside of the cap using tampo printing.
"The final package perfectly [embodies] what [Kenzo Parfums] wanted," says Lazarus. FlowerbyKenzo—launched in September 2000—received The Fragrance Foundation's 2001 FiFi Award for best women's European fragrance.