Bottles & Tottles: Bold Bottle Designs
Brands are using color and shape to make bold statements.
By Marie Redding, Senior EditorFor marketers, choosing the correct bottle shape for a product is an important decision. Round cylinders are still being used, sometimes decorated with bold graphics. Conical and curved elliptical shapes have also been very popular. "The European markets have always had more of a flair for unique-looking bottle shapes and sizes," says Alex Piagnarelli, vice president of sales and marketing at M&H Plastics USA (Winchester, VA). "As a UK/European-based company, M&H Plastics has been bringing innovation to the U.S. marketplace for years. Our unique custom and standard bottle shapes have been creating a fresh-looking landscape on retail shelves in the North American market."
In the hair care market, the right color for a bottle is equally important in building a brand’s image. Charles Worthington London uses a rainbow of colors in sorbet shades. The signature color for Aquage is blue. Sexy Hair Concepts recently chose new packaging in regal purple and vibrant yellow. Read on to find out more about the bottles in these hair care lines.
An Elliptical Rainbow
The elliptical-shaped bottles in the Charles Worthington London hair care line have a great presence on shelves. The bottles are all modern hues of pink, lime green, lemon yellow, Caribbean blue, and tangerine. They are color-coded according to hair type.
"We have developed a family of colors to use as new products are added to the line throughout the years. The colors complement each other in-store, working together as a total range," says Naomi Robinson, brand development manager, Charles Worthington London. The line contains 10 different product categories, including Results and Big Hair. The custom bottles are all polypropylene, with large flip-top caps that click shut with a snap.
Before he was a hairdresser, Charles Worthington trained as an architect. When he built his first salon, he worked directly with architects to create its contemporary look with strong, clean lines. Worthington collaborated with package designers and suppliers to ensure his hair care line reflected the same strong, clean style.
The elliptical bottle shape has been used since the launch of the Charles Worthington brand—1996 in the UK, and since 1999 in the United States. When the design was first presented, the bottle’s shape was considered so challenging that only one supplier would take on the project. It is a blow-molded bottle, and the blow ratio needed to create this shape had never been used before. It required a substantial investment of time and funding to perfect the production process.
Takeaways are a range of small-sized bottles in the same shape that are designed to be easy to travel with. At the same time, the regular-sized bottles in the line were updated to larger 10.9-oz sizes. They were developed to meet the demands of the U.S. market for larger-sized bottles. Some bottles are decorated using a silk-screening process and others use labels. The line is sold in mass-market stores.
"Uniqueness of a structure is a crucial factor in building a successful, identifiable brand. We can confidently claim the elliptical bottle shape as our own, since all of our consumer tests have shown outstanding brand recognition linked with the structure. When combined with our color palette and graphic design, we have been able to communicate our brand personality of confidence, youthful spirit and, most crucially, product quality," says Robinson.
Blue Bottles and Tottles
The bottles for Aquage’s Fortifying Ultragel (top) and Hydrating Shampoo feature the brand’s trademark blue color.
Blue is the Aquage brand’s signature color. Different shades of it are used throughout the line for a coordinated look. A few of the bottles and tottles in the collection are clear, and contain different shades of blue products inside.
"It can be difficult to build a brand’s image based on color, but I am proud that we have been able to achieve a certain amount of recognition in the minds of consumers," says Dennis Lubin, president and founder of Salonquest, which manufactures and markets the Aquage brand.
Aquage is a professional hair care brand sold exclusively in salons. "We want the packaging to help make it easier to use the products. All of the shapes have been designed with the stylist in mind," says Lubin. "Convenience is so important. Flip-top caps on tottles work great. Also, pull-off caps on bottles with trigger sprays or pumps are important. Nothing should ever have to be unscrewed."
Many of the bottles in the Aquage line are tall, but small in diameter. This makes them easy to grasp and hold onto when styling hair. The tottles are shorter, but just as easy to hold. All of the designing is done in-house. The custom packages are sourced, supplied, and decorated in-house by Kaufman Container (Cleveland). "What’s most challenging about working with Aquage is that they want to be innovative, and they want their bottles to look very different on shelf," says Mary Chase, account manager, Kaufman Container.
In order to differentiate the brand’s new Hydrating product line, its Leave-In Treatment is packaged in a cone-shaped bottle with a trigger spray. "We chose a trigger spray so that to would be easier to pump the product out of this bottle shape," says Lubin. "A lot of the trigger sprays we found were too big. Kaufman helped us find the right one with a nice profile." The bottle’s neck is smaller than on most other cone shapes, but the correct size spray was eventually found in China.
A cone-shaped bottle can be challenging to decorate. A silk-screening process was used. "The artwork had to be developed following an arc shape, and it is difficult because its center radius is constantly changing," explains Chase.
Fortifying Ultragel is packaged in a clear bottle with a pump spray. Its formula contains conditioning sea pearls inside, which look like round blue beads, adding a great visual element. "We wanted the pearls to be blue, but it is one of the toughest colors to keep stable. We have to caution salons against keeping the product in direct sunlight, to prevent color change," Rubin says.
Since there are so many different types of products and different-shaped packages in the Aquage line, it is important that the color blue remain the one consistent design element. "It is the perfect color to convey the benefits of our formulas, which contain minerals from the sea," adds Lubin.
Yellow and Purple Hues
Sexy Hair Concepts has relaunched packaging for its Short Sexy Hair (above) and Silky Sexy Hair (below) collections.
The team at Sexy Hair Concepts did a lot of research on colors before relaunching its Short Sexy Hair and Silky Sexy Hair collections in new packaging.
"Yellow is the first color the human eye will notice. It stimulates the brain, and its energy is associated with feelings of wisdom and knowledge," says Doreen Imperial, marketing manager for Sexy Hair Concepts. The Short Sexy Hair collection launched its new packaging in July. Its silver bottles and bright-yellow caps are complimented by race-car inspired labels, with a shiny diamond-plate pattern. "Since this brand was specifically developed for short hair, we have strong brand loyalty with both men and women," says Imperial. "We believe this new design will appeal to both men and women because of the combination of colors and textures," she adds.
Two new products in different bottle shapes were also added to the line in July. Double Header is packaged in a triangle-shaped bottle, and What A Body was repackaged in a short, bevel-shaped bottle with a flip-top cap. "The different bottle shapes are extremely important in making the entire line look a little more fun and funky and stand apart from other brands," says Imperial.
In March, the Silky Sexy Hair collection was relaunched in new packaging, which was changed from a neutral color palette to a regal shade of purple. "When it comes to choosing colors and bottle shapes, we are all about emotional branding. Purple depicts power, beauty, and luxury, and it presents itself well on the shelf," says Andrea Espinoza, brand manager, Sexy Hair.
The new bottles are also taller and more column-shaped. "The larger, cylindrical shape allows us to have a greater shelf presence in stores. We are able to cover more real estate," Espinoza adds. The bottle shapes are custom designed by Design Worx (Lake Forest, CA). The graphics are silk-screened on the bottles and were designed in-house by Carlo Horowitz, art director at Sexy Hair Concepts. Its push-open caps were also a new design. When a button is pressed down, the cap pops open so product is dispensed with ease.
The team could feel proud its design goals were achieved, since the bottle shapes combined with colors and graphics used in this line certainly do make a statement.
Future Trends
"We are consistently hearing a lot of requests for tottles in the hair care market. Consumers like inverted packaging because it offers the convenience of having the product ready for immediate use," says Piagnarelli of M&H Plastics. He has also seen an increased interest in smaller bottle sizes.
No matter what new bottle shapes suppliers will be molding next, if they are as attractive as the brands mentioned above, they are sure to sell.
Taking a Look at Tottles
In the hair care market, sometimes companies differentiate between a shampoo and a conditioner by using a bottle for one and a tottle for the other. Tottles also provide dispensing benefits that some marketers are attracted to.
“I have been seeing more and more tottles being used now in many different markets,” says Karina Weber, marketing and sales coordinator at Weber International (Vaudreuil, QC, Canada). “Many smaller companies are now interested in them. About 90% of all the requests I receive for packaging are for tottles as opposed to bottles.”
Karina’s father, Heinz Weber, is president and owner of Weber International. He can be credited with inventing the tottle during the late 1970s, when he was the owner of Westra, which he later sold to CCL Industries.
“At the time, it was difficult to get very small tubes from the marketplace,” Heinz says. “We decided to design a bottle with a very round bottom, so that it would stand in its cap. It was first made for Estée Lauder and Helena Rubinstein.” This initial tottle design was used by one company until two years ago, when its patent expired. Since then, the idea to stand a bottle on its cap has been copied by numerous other companies.
Now, Weber International has a comprehensive library of molds, including 11 different families of tottles. “I believe that it is the most comprehensive collection in both North America and Europe,” says Karina. The company even developed a cap system that allows tottles to be filled at very high speeds.
Since the demand for tottles is showing no sign of slowing down, we will look forward to seeing even more interesting shapes from Weber in the future.