Personal Care Feature: Making Bottles Beautiful
This year, personal-care and fragrance bottles promise to delight—despite cost.
Fragrance bottles like Montblanc's Presence, launched in 2001, promote an impression of quality that, despite current cost pressures, promises to be a trend this season and beyond. Manufacturers of personal-care and fragrance products are looking to cut their packaging costs and meet the demands of increasingly price-conscious consumers. However, intense competition to attract these shoppers in both high-end and mass markets still demands creative, exciting bottle designs.
Consequently, package designers are using a wide variety of shapes, decorating techniques, colors, and materials in innovative ways to produce bottles that make unique and appealing statements. In fact, with so many companies striving to be distinctive, perhaps the differences rather than similarities among bottles will be spring's defining aspect. Even so, some trends are already apparent, and promise to continue in 2002.
Reflecting Quality
One of the most important trends in bottle design this season is a continued focus on quality. Consumers in both high-end and mass markets are looking for the best values in the products they buy, and designers have responded by packaging products with very heavy glass bottles and smooth, classic shapes.
Manufacturers are definitely focusing on "the upscale look for both mass and high perfumery," according to Patrick Etchaubard, vice president and general manager, fragrance container division, at Bormioli Luigi USA (Langhorne, PA), one of the largest suppliers of fragrance and cosmetic glass bottles.
Etchaubard notes that, in addition to heavy glass, his company is also seeing a continued interest in other quality features, such as smooth or invisible seam lines, perfect walls, and crystal-clear, flawless glass.
For example, Montblanc's Presence, a bottle manufactured by Bormioli Luigi and launched in 2001, has the look of quality that this year's designers are striving for. Walter Johnsen is director of communication at Cosmopolitan Cosmetics (New York City), the firm that designed the bottle. According to Johnsen, the design required a new process of flaming the bottle after it was molded to produce its seamless, half-shaped design. Such careful attention to detail promotes a strong impression of quality.
Stocking Up
Even as manufacturers send a message of high quality with their bottles, another growing trend is the use of stock molds in classic shapes to produce bottles in more-cost-effective ways.
Although many high-end manufacturers are notable exceptions to this trend, companies of all sizes and reputations are increasingly demanding stock molding to reduce costs. By using stock molds, manufacturers can invest more in other quality factors for their mass-market designs and even some higher-end bottles.
Annette Green, president of The Fragrance Foundation (New York City), says, "Pricing is becoming increasingly important. The price-conscious consumer is influencing everyone down the line. Marketers are increasingly using existing molds dressed up with caps, labels, and color. I think this is going to have a big impact on packaging and design."
Getting Creative
This greater use of stock molds has let designers and manufacturers focus more on creative decoration techniques, original uses of materials, and varied colors to define their bottles.
In terms of decoration techniques, Etchaubard says his company is seeing a demand for "all of the above: a lot of spraying, frosting, partial sandblasting, and so forth. In fact, our customers are spending more on decoration than they have in previous years." Also, Etchaubard cites a "greater sophistication in the marriage between metal and glass or plastic and glass.
"Where we were [seeing] minimalism in the 1990s," says Green, "I think the trend now is convincing consumers that they are getting a lot for their money. Decoration is going to be a very important aspect of that: using new technologies and techniques to produce something that people haven't seen before. From the standpoint of materials, almost anything goes. Combinations of materials, such as plastics, glass, metals, and rubber, for example, are in greater use."
Lacquering also continues to be an important technique this season, adds Johnsen. It is valuable as a method of producing enhanced color in glass bottles.
Annabelle stock bottles from DieterBakicEnterprises feature wide and narrow faces well suited for printing and labeling. Stock packages not only allow companies to invest more in materials and decoration, but also enable them to select simple shapes that allow easy decoration. "Regarding shapes and materials, bottles should provide an ideal basis for graphic design and decoration," says Eric Firmin, vice president, sales and marketing, for DieterBakicEnterprises Inc. (Munich), a maker of stock packaging for fragrances and treatment and color cosmetics. "Large, well-designed surface areas make printing and labeling easy," Firmin says. For example, Annabelle stock bottles produced by DieterBakicEnterprises offer narrow and wide faces that can be easily decorated and emphasized.
In addition to innovative decoration and materials, color choices also promise to be exciting and extremely varied. One reason for this is a move toward bottles that reflect either masculine or feminine characteristics. "There is a move away from the unisex look in bottles," says Green. "I think this is a trend that's going to continue, because it is happening in the actual fragrances as well."
This move is accompanied by greater variety in color choices. "Color is extremely important this spring and summer," says Green. "I think people are equating bottle color even more than they did before with what's inside. We're seeing greater use of colored liquids and colored fragrances."
As for which colors in particular will be popular this season, Green notes that "practically everything goes, although I think tones of blues, purples, greens, and shades of pink are all going to be very important."
Trendspotting
This spring, despite a wide variety of approaches, shapes, techniques, colors, and materials in bottle design, there are also some trends. Driven by a price-conscious market, companies are seeking to emphasize high quality and value in their products. At the same time, many are turning to stock molds as a way to produce bottles cost-effectively. There is a greater emphasis on decoration, on using materials in new ways and in combination, and on the use of color. And although the price issue will be a factor in trends to come, bottle designers will continue to offer fresh and exciting approaches.