In Closing: We Love Dior
Unique technology was used to adorn the I Love Dior bottle in jeans-style graphics. It looks like a label, but it's not.
By Marie Redding Senior EditorLaunched in February, I Love Dior is a limited-edition fragrance for spring/summer 2003, and it's dressed appropriately.
Bormioli Luigi (Parma, Italy) designed the glass bottle and hired Cerve (Parma, Italy) to "dress" it in designer jeans, using "a mixture of a silk-screen process and a label process," says Patrick Etchaubard, president of the fragrance container division of Bormioli Luigi USA.
This technique is faster and less expensive than silk-screening, says a Cerve representative. It's meant to resemble a label, and the decoration wraps around the entire bottle. The back pocket of the jeans appears on the other side.
Cerve calls the newly invented technique "thermic transfer." The firm had to modify machinery to be able to decorate the Dior bottle. It has used a similar technique before, but only for tableware and barware, never for a fragrance bottle. So far, the technique has only been applied to cylindrical and oval-shaped bottles, never for square-shaped packages, although Cerve says it is possible.
"After we were shown the artwork, we thought this process would give us the best results," a representative at Cerve says.
A machine transfers the colors all at one time onto the glass, similar to the way a bobbin on a sewing machine transfers thread. It is then baked at 600º.
Cerve is the only company in Europe to use this automatic method right now. Other companies are able to apply this type of decoration onto glass and achieve similar results, but it is done manually, which makes the price very high.
Silk-screening would have resulted in the same look, but its capacity for production is often very low, according to experts at Cerve. Another drawback to silk-screening is that if there's one mistake, the entire batch has to be redone. With this technique, up to six colors can be done at one time, at a production capacity of up to 15,000 bottles a day.
"We are very proud of the way it looks," says Etchaubard. He adds, "We are collaborating with another very large company in America, which will soon be launching a beautiful bottle decorated using the same technique. It may launch by September."