In Closing
Packaging Plays an Organic Part
By Lori Bryan, EditorWhen organic body-care company Wild Earth (Lake Bluff, IL) envisioned the packaging for its first product line, Inara, it pictured a design reflective of the products themselves. "We wanted the packages for Inara to have an indigenous look, to speak volumes about where the products' ingredients come from," says Anne Dolbeau, managing director of Wild Earth. "While consumers may not immediately identify that our main ingredient and our soaps are from Brazil, they get the feeling [from the packaging] that the items are from South America."
Creating such a feeling of place about the Inara collection was important to Wild Earth. "When consumers use Inara, they give their skin the benefits of organic ingredients," Dolbeau says. "And they directly engage in a relationship that supports the livelihood of more than 400,000 families in Brazil." The company purchases babassu oil from several women's cooperatives there. The women harvest the oil and set its price. Such fair trade, says Dolbeau, is a cornerstone of Inara.
To share Inara's support of social and economic exchange with customers, Wild Earth made packaging the messenger. It hired Chicago-based design firm The Gams Group to create unique, elegant packages that would convey Inara's sense of place and purpose.
The finished packages, which launched last year, recently won Best of Show in Package Design at the 31st Annual Mobius Advertising Awards competition. Winning the award, says Dolbeau, is a testament to how the packages reflect the quality of Inara's ingredients and the social exchange that makes the products a reality. "The look is high-end," but also handmade, which brings out the human aspect of the products and how they came to be, she says. "We do all the finished packaging at our facility in Lake Bluff. We wrap the tissue, tie the twine, and apply the stickers ourselves."
The labor of love is evident across the Inara collection. The Babassu Soap Trio comes wrapped in colorful tissue paper and is tied with hemp twine. The Babassu Sugar Rub is packaged in a keepsake clay pot that is handcrafted exclusively for Inara by a family-owned business in Mexico. The Amaté Bark Lantern Candle is covered in copper-toned mesh that consumers can see through. What they are able to see is the Amaté bark paper, fashioned from the Amaté tree by artisans in Puebla, Mexico, which surrounds the candle and remains in the form of a paper lantern after the candle has burned.
For more information on Inara, visit http://www.inaraorganic.com. To find out more about the Annual Mobius Advertising Awards, visit http://www.mobiusawards.com.