Latest Launches
A Growing Trend
CPC Packaging’s January/February In Closing column reported on an innovative new concept—cartons that grow plants. The article’s subject was a seed-infused carton launched by personal care brand Pangea Organics. Happily, the trend for this eco-friendly package is germinating. Cargo Cosmetics just launched its new PlantLove lipstick, whose secondary carton also incorporates flower seeds.
Both Cargo’s and Pangea Organics’ cartons are made from biodegradable paper. During production, seeds are mixed in with the paper pulp. Customers can wet the carton with water and place it in soil. Eventually, a plant sprouts.
The lipstick container for PlantLove is also earth-friendly. It is made from 100% biodegradable, corn-based polylactic acid (PLA) resin. According to Cargo, PLA is a greenhouse-gas-neutral polymer that doesn’t contribute to global warming.
Cargo’s president, Hana Zalzal, says, “I think this is the wave of the future. Why would you make something out of a nonrenewable resource when you can make it out of a renewable one?”
With PlantLove, Cargo shows just how attractive sustainable materials can be. The brand decorated PlantLove’s packaging with graphics of flowers and hearts. “We created a 1960s kind of feel,” says Zalzal. “It goes with our tagline, ‘The PlantLove seeds we sow today impact future generations.’” Zalzal adds that printing on the carton was challenging because the specialty carton stock absorbed the ink differently than traditional paperboard does.
Zalzal says that she first began exploring sustainable packaging options two years ago. At the time, she says, many suppliers she approached weren’t working with PLA. However, she says, “The evolution from the past two years to now has been tremendous. It’s nice to see more suppliers coming out with PLA packaging. It makes it a lot easier now that so many suppliers are eager to work with it.”
Zalzal agrees that when suppliers make environmentally friendly packaging options more readily available and easy to use, marketers are more likely to choose them. By contrast, suppliers are more likely to offer PLA packaging if more marketers demand it.
For now, brands like Cargo and Pangea Organics are sowing the seeds of change by choosing sustainable packaging. “When we can make products kinder to the environment, we should and we will,” says Zalzal. “We hope others will follow suit. I’d say this is the only time we’ve launched a product hoping that other brands will copy us.”
PlantLove debuted exclusively at Sephora in February and became available nationally in March.
A Skin Care Line with a History in Wine
The Mondavi name is famous in the wine industry, thanks to winemaker Robert Mondavi. The Mondavi name may soon become prominent in the skin care industry as well, thanks to a new skin care line launched by Mondavi’s grandson, Carlo, and his business partners Joseph Spellman and Josh LeVine. The Davi line touts the antioxidant benefits of fermented grape extracts.
Davi is positioned as a luxury line and, as such, debuted at Henri Bendel. The primary packages are stock and minimalist. They are sourced from international suppliers and decorated with the Davi logo—a coat of arms designed by Carlo Mondavi and LeVine. Davi also received design assistance from New York City–based design and advertising firm Lloyd (+co) and package sourcing help from Doug Williams at contract manufacturer Mana Products (Long Island City, NY).
The high-end outer cartons pay homage to the line’s winemaking roots. The cartons for the men’s products are a deep burgundy shade, inspired by the color of red grapes. The women’s cartons are the color of green grapes. To mimic the style of a wine label, a thin label extends from the front of the carton and over its top.
“We wanted to create something that paid respect to the wine heritage of our brand—but we didn’t want to overdo it,” says LeVine, Davi’s creative director and executive vice president. “We didn’t want to put grapes on our packaging or make the bottles look like wine bottles.”
To give the cartons the high-end, textured feel of a wine label, the Davi partners chose linen paper stock. “One of our challenges was finding the best paper,” says LeVine. Two suppliers, Knoll Packaging (Roslyn Heights, NY) and Ares Printing & Packaging (Brooklyn, NY), supplied the cartons.
Le Grand Cru, the line’s face cream, is the star of the collection. For that product, Davi had Knoll create a heavy-duty setup box. The box is wrapped in hand-dyed linen-textured paper. “The paper is dyed in reams before it’s assembled on the cartons,” says LeVine. He adds that color-matching the cartons between the two suppliers was challenging. As a personal touch, LeVine and Carlo, both musicians, included a white, pearlized guitar pick in the setup box that replaces a traditional scoop or spoon.
The folding cartons produced by Ares also feature paper with a linen texture. And Ares created miniature cartons for Davi’s product samples, which are housed in small jars.
The small-sized cartons make Davi’s samples more elaborate. “We were a new brand, and we definitely wanted to get into the luxury market,” says LeVine. “We thought that it would be a good investment right out the gate to create an amazing sample to show people what we were all about. Asking someone to buy a new face cream for $175 is a lot to ask, so it’s nice to give customers a taste of it in exquisite packaging.”
The samples are handed out in stores. LeVine says that when Davi hosted a wine tasting event at Bergdorf Goodman, the company had waiters carry trays with glasses of wine and the product samples on them.
Crabtree & Evelyn Puts a Student’s Design in the Spotlight
English personal care brand Crabtree & Evelyn put a 23-year-old design school student in charge of creating the graphics for its two new fragrance lines. Laura Tarrant-Brown’s design is now the trademark for the company’s new Lost and Found collections.
Crabtree & Evelyn invited students from London’s Central Saint Martin’s College of Art & Design to design graphics for the new Lost and Found fragrances. Tarrant-Brown’s winning design features botanicals and a tiara, which are meant to represent the company’s history of botanical formulations.
“Laura’s design contained all the aspects that we had hoped for to represent the heritage of Crabtree & Evelyn and to take it to new customers,” says Robin Anderson, Crabtree & Evelyn’s creative director. “It has a botanical reference, which is always relevant. The crown adds humor in a very English way. It has a subtle irreverence. The black and white design is also contemporary.”
Prior to having the students design, Crabtree & Evelyn showed them the stock fragrance bottle that would be used. “Crabtree & Evelyn had already decided on the bottle and showed it to us during the briefing,” says Tarrant-Brown. “[Seeing the bottle] helped me in terms of knowing that the design was to appear on a clean, flat surface. Therefore, the design itself could afford to be a little more complicated. It also helped [to know] that the appeal was obviously to be created by the graphics, and thus, they had to be relatively striking.”
Tarrant-Brown, who says she is used to working on larger-scale illustrations, says that it was challenging to work with the smaller dimensions of a fragrance bottle. “It would have been easy to make the design too complicated,” she says.
Anderson says that Crabtree & Evelyn likes nurturing young students. “As creative director, I am very keen to work with fresh, young talent. We have worked with Central Saint Martin’s college before on brand initiatives with great success. We are also speaking to a college in the United States about another project, so more such projects are to come.”
Tarrant-Brown’s design appears on the fragrance bottles, as well as on ancillary packages—including packages for a solid perfume, a body spray, and a shower gel.
High-Profile Fragrances
Suppliers Axilone (New York City) and Rexam Dispensing Systems (Purchase, NY) created components for several new fragrance launches.
Axilone created the cap and collar for Viktor & Rolf’s first men’s fragrance, Antidote. Both components were made from polypropylene. The cap was manufactured in two pieces to avoid shrink marks. The unique collar was designed to simulate melted wax dripping down the bottle’s neck. According to Axilone, this effect was made possible by the soft nature of the polypropylene.
Rexam Dispensing Systems provided components for United Color of Benetton’s new men’s, women’s, and unisex fragrances. Each fragrance bottle is surrounded by a transparent, injection-molded PMMA box, which Rexam produced.
The PMMA box accommodates Rexam’s SP6 crimp-on pump and an injection-molded plastic spray cap. The spray cap was UV metallized a glossy silver. The outside of the PMMA box was pad printed with graphics.
Rexam also provided a super-low-profile pump for Coty Prestige’s Vera Wang Princess fragrance. The pump has a glass ball bearing. Vera Wang Princess is the first commercial launch featuring Rexam’s glass-ball pump. An alternative to a metal ball bearing, the glass ball bearing makes the internal mechanisms of the pump appear invisible to the customer. The pump also contains no elastomers and no rubber gaskets that could contaminate the product.
Airline-Friendly Products
Oloff Beauty’s Barex Minis is a line of travel-sized hair care products that launched in March. The line contains Barex products in smaller-sized versions of their retail packages.
The 3-oz plastic bottles were designed to simulate the look of the larger bottles in order to build brand recognition. Guita Dovas, founder and CEO of Oloff Beauty, was excited when she realized that the bottle size she chose met current airline regulations for carry-on luggage. “I didn’t plan it that way. I was very lucky,” she says.
Dovas made sure the bottles squeezed easily. The flip-top caps have indentations for customers to place their thumb on when pushing the cap up. The caps’ orifices are sized to dispense just the right amount of product.
Suppliers might have reason to offer marketers a wider variety of small-sized stock bottles in the future if carry-on restrictions continue. Whether or not air travel is involved, however, there still seems to be a demand for small-sized packaging lately.
“We are now such a mobile society that it has become important for every brand to include travel sizes in its product lineup. Women like to carry these products in their bag every day,” says Dovas.
Smaller-sized packaging might also help inspire brand loyalty. “If you make it convenient for your customers to use your brand wherever they are, they will be very happy,” says Dovas.