Editors’ Choice Award Winner: Fragrance
Flowerbomb by Viktor & Rolf
by L’Oréal Designer Fragrances
The bottle for Flowerbomb, the first fragrance from Dutch design team Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren, juxtaposes beauty and aggression.
Designed by Fabien Baron, the faceted glass bottle was inspired by the look of a hand grenade. An ornament reminiscent of a hand grenade’s safety pin protrudes from the bottle’s collar and was adorned with a black plastic seal. Contrasting with the violent hand-grenade image, the fragrance’s color imparts a delicate pink tint on the clear glass.
“The fragrance is like an explosion of flowers—fragile in a fleeting moment of enchanting beauty—in a bottle cut like a multifaceted diamond, the hardest and most indestructible stone in existence,” says Ulli Lindauer, assistant vice president, L’Oréal Marketing, European Designer Fragrances Division.
Pochet created the bottle from clear flint glass. “The sharp facets were quite difficult to achieve,” says Lucie Ray-Lalanne, marketing manager for Pochet. “The biggest challenge was to find the right balance between the sharpness of the angles and the intensity of fire-polishing, which usually smoothes angles and edges to get an almost perfect and very shiny glass surface.”
According to L’Oréal, the bottle’s aluminum cap was inspired by fine jewelry. Both the cap and collar were anodized in pink. Axilone Metal in Spain produced both components. “The challenge was to get identical colors for the cap and the collar and to get a perfect fit between the two pieces,” says Laurent Fontaine, vice president of sales for Axilone. The black polypropylene seal accessory was produced by Axilone Plastique in France and attached to the collar. Saint-Gobain Calmar supplied the low-profile stock dispenser.
Flowerbomb’s ornate, heavy carton also combines delicate and bold elements. Supplied by Cartondruck, the carton was made from uncoated board with a light-pink matte pearlescent finish.
Graphics resembling black ribbons wrap around the carton. The ribbon décor was produced using hot stamping and embossing. “The goal was to simulate an authentic ribbon,” says Steffen Schnizer of Cartondruck. “The most challenging part was achieving perfect registration for the two passes of hot stamping and the embossing, especially along the carton’s crease lines.” To match the seal accessory on the bottle, a large black plastic seal decorated with the Viktor & Rolf logo was glued onto the carton.
“Personally, I feel the carton achieves the marketing message brilliantly,” says awards panelist Maiken Erstad, design director for Dragon Rouge. “It is kind of old world, but done in a very modern way. The balance between the delicate, very feminine pink and the bold, brazen—but still very elegant—black seal is really good. It is very authoritative in a way and very confident. I was drawn to it immediately when I walked into the store.”