Editors’ Choice Award Winner: Personal Care
Island Michael Kors Bath and Body Collection
by The Estée Lauder Companies
Take one look at the packaging for the Island Michael Kors bath and body collection and visions of a calm sea instantly come to mind. Package designer Chad Lavigne of Chad Lavigne LLC created the design concept in collaboration with Kevin MacCarthy, executive director of package development for The Estée Lauder Companies.
The luxurious packages perfectly complement the products’ formulations. Ocean Bath Soak is packaged in a transparent jar. The bath salts look like grains of sand yet, surprisingly, they turn turquoise in bath water. The jar’s square shape was designed to match the rectangular Island Michael Kors fragrance bottle. The jar comprises two pieces and is made from heavy-walled, fabricated plastic. Instead of a round interior, the jar’s interior is square.
“We injection molded the base with a sonic-welded finish. This, combined with a smooth top surface, results in a beautiful square shape with perfectly uniform distribution on all four walls,” explains Harry Bennett, vice president of technical packaging for The Estée Lauder Companies. The resin is tinted turquoise, but due to the 3-in.-thick walls, the color is only evident in the corner of the sidewall. “The color is most intense at the point where the walls join,” explains MacCarthy.
The cap for Ocean Bath Soak was injection molded in two pieces and then assembled. The outer part of the cap is made from electroplated chrome, with a recessed logo. “Creating the tool for a recessed logo is more difficult than for a raised one,” explains MacCarthy. The majority of the mold needs to be carved until the small logo is left standing alone—rather than simply carving out just the logo. “In order to maintain the cap’s large, flat surface around the recessed logo, the mold had to be perfectly polished around all the letters,” adds Bennett. The jar and cap are both supplied by Jackel.
“The two different-sized fragrance bottles and the Bath Soak jar all have very squared edges and are all the same height so that they form a horizon line when merchandised on store shelves,” says Lavigne.
Waterfall Shower Gel and Body Lotion are in transparent bottles that allow their turquoise shades to be seen. These two products are in the same PET bottle, supplied by PMP and decorated with a hot-stamped logo in silver foil. The bottle caps are colored turquoise and supplied by MaticPlast.
All of the folding cartons for the Island Michael Kors brand are made of white solid-bleached-sulfate board laminated to turquoise cotton linen. The fabric is hot stamped with a debossed Kors logo in silver foil. The cartons are all produced by Cartondruck.
CPC Packaging’s awards panelist, Henry Renella, vice president of package development for The Estée Lauder Companies, says, “The designers did a phenomenal job. The idea to have the color only coming up from the bottom of the packaging was executed perfectly.” Panelist Maiken Erstad, design director for Dragon Rouge, who also loved the packaging, says, “This is a brilliant way of bringing color into a package.”