Designer Interview: Mina Trujillo
Mina Trujillo
Maria B. Cosmetics
By Marie Redding, Senior EditorMina Trujillo is the founder and creative director of Maria B. Cosmetics. She established the company in 2003 with the mission of creating every shade of red lipstick that any woman will ever need. Besides a unique variety of lip colors, her line includes many multifunctional products. Trujillo showed her line to potential store buyers for the first time during the Ex-Tracts show in August.
Maria B.’s core product is a group of 30 red lip colors. The lip colors are packaged in round pots rather than as traditional lipstick bullets. The pot has a hinged lid with a clear window. “I chose this type of package so that you could easily use the product as a rouge by applying it with your fingers. Also, because the color is so pigmented, it could be used as a stain on the lips,” Trujillo says.
In addition, Maria B. offers 25 shades of brown and neutral eye shadow colors to complement the red lipstick shades. These are packaged in the same type of pot. “The eye colors can also be used wet or dry and with different brushes to work as an eyeliner or an eyebrow filler,” she explains.
The Maria B. collection also includes nine lip shines packaged in traditional bottles with doe-foot applicators. The bottles are silk-screened with a zebra pattern. “This decoration was difficult to achieve,” says Trujillo. “Our idea for the decoration to be printed around the entire bottle was turned down by three different packaging suppliers before we were finally able to find a company to work on it with us. We had to keep reworking the design with our graphic artist to make sure it would match up around the bottle.” World Wide Packaging (Florham Park, NJ) supplies and decorates this package.
“Matching the 360° pattern and getting it to flow smoothly was a challenge, but it was redesigned by the graphic artist at Maria B., and the component looks great,” explains Kimyon Holmes, vice president of sales at World Wide Packaging (Woodland Hills, CA). The zebra pattern is a signature look for the Maria B. brand.
A bronzer compact features a blue Swarovski crystal.World Wide Packaging also supplies a black rectangular compact called Miss Glossy and a liquidfoundation bottle. The Miss Glossy compact, which is filled with a lipstick and two shades of lip shine, is decorated with a Swarovski crystal and gold hot-stamping. The foundation bottle has a lid that flips up to reveal a mirror, and a compartment in its cap is filled with concealer. All of the packages supplied by World Wide Packaging are stock molds with a soft-touch finish.
Other packages in the Maria B. collection, which Trujillo plans to change every season, contain face powders and bronzers. They are round paperboard compacts supplied by Chicago Paper Tube & Can Co. (Chicago). The largest pot contains bronzer and is adorned with a detailed picture representing snakes slithering under the sun.
“We glued an iridescent paper onto the paperboard. We decorated it using red foils with a hot-stamping process,” explains Chrissy Cabay, marketing manager at Chicago Paper Tube. A blue Swarovski crystal was placed in the center of the sun.
Trujillo is already working on new face powders launching next spring. “I will be using faux-crocodile paper on the paperboard pots,” she says. “Paperboard makes it easy to change designs often. I want this part of the collection to constantly change with fashion trends.”