Designer Interview: Tim Milne
Tim Milne
Destination Nation
By Marie Redding, Senior EditorTim Milne, who is originally from the United Kingdom, has always been fascinated by the road system in the United States. “I’ve always thought that maps have a strange, but beautiful, design aesthetic,” he says. Milne admires how U.S. roads are named and how the interstates have numbered signs shaped like emblems. “In Europe, all the signs just have arrows that point to where you’re going. Here, it’s as if the road itself is the destination, and there’s a sense of romance about that,” he says. Milne’s fondness for maps inspired the packaging behind the new men’s brand, Destination Nation.
One of Destination Nation’s four founders, Milne is responsible for the brand’s packaging and also handles its marketing. Before moving to the United States three years ago, Milne owned a small packaging company in London. His wife, Susan, who is a graphic designer, and his friend Amy Faulkner first came up with the idea to create men’s products. Faulkner has worked in the beauty industry for 15 years, and she worked on all the formulations. Then the trio enlisted the help of graphic designer Evan Cotter.
From the beginning, the four founders knew they wanted to market the products to guys in their 20s. The travel theme inspired the package design. Most products, such as the body wash, shampoo, and conditioner, are in flask-shaped plastic bottles with silver screw-on caps. Creative Packaging Solutions (Keyport, NJ) sourced these bottles. The silver labels feature road signs with different Interstate numbers on each product.
When the products first launched, a lot of the packaging was done at home, by hand. Paper labels were printed on sheets, peeled, and stuck onto the bottles individually.
One of the greatest challenges was figuring out how to package a boxed gift set on a budget. Milne knew that printing a box would be too costly. “I rang up every major tourist office in all 50 states and asked them to send us maps, because we didn’t know what else to do,” he says. The thousands of maps Milne received were used to line the insides of the boxes. “We’d all work for days with a bucket of glue and a roller. It was very unpleasant,” Milne adds.
Now, the majority of the filling and packaging processes are done professionally. The boxes are produced on automated machines by Commonwealth Specialty Packaging (Chesterfield, VA). Newly designed silver labels for the bottles are printed by LabelTech (Somersworth, NH) using a unique metallic varnish. The bar soap is square and is still hand-wrapped in silver foil. Its packaging was inspired by a Klondike ice cream bar.
Finding suppliers with low-enough order minimums is a constant challenge, and all of the packaging decisions are driven by cost. “We just found a fantastic company the other day, Express Tubes, that has agreed to drastically lower its minimum requirement for us,” says Milne. Soon, the brand will launch a shaving cream in the supplier’s tube. Milne knows that the brand’s packaging will evolve over time. For now, he is comfortable with the solutions it has found. “We’ll have many more options in the future when we’re doing larger volumes,” he says.