Editors’ Choice Award Winner: Personal Care
With Love...Hilary Duff Moisturizing Body Lotion
by Elizabeth Arden
The team at Elizabeth Arden first collaborated with Hilary Duff last year to launch the teen actress/pop star’s first fragrance, With Love...Hilary Duff, along with this fragranced body lotion. The lotion is packaged in a tube, and its outer carton is printed with an intricate design. The packaging concept was inspired by Duff’s personal style of mixing vintage and modern elements.
“Our customers, mainly young women, like the fact that this package design was influenced by Hilary’s own personal tastes. The shade of robin’s-egg blue on the tube and carton match the color of Hilary’s bedroom,” says Cheryl Mendelson, design director, Elizabeth Arden.
A polyethylene tube with a matte finish was chosen to match the texture of the carton. “For our customer, we felt that a tube was more user-friendly, rather than a bottle,” says Mendelson. The tube’s polypropylene flip-top cap is custom colored a shimmery plum shade to match the carton’s base. The tube and cap are supplied by Tubed Products. A label was used to decorate the tube because it works with the detailed graphics. The label is printed by Dow Industries.
Mendelson chose to use textured, uncoated paper for the carton, comparing it to an artist’s watercolor pad. “I wanted the carton to have an artistic feel,” she says. This paper stock complements the whimsical look of the graphics, which are meant to look as if they were drawn by hand. The embossed, felted paper stock is supplied by Mohawk Fine Papers.
“A lot of consideration has been given to this secondary packaging,” comments awards panelist Hana Zalzal, president of Cargo Cosmetics. “It is well executed and has shelf appeal.”
Panelist George Kress, vice president of corporate package innovations for The Estée Lauder Companies, also comments on this carton. “The standout elements of this package are the carton’s texture and look,” he says.
The carton is primarily blue with a band of shimmery plum. The plum shade was achieved by Arkay Packaging using a combination of two printing technologies: lithography, to print the undertones, and flexography, to print the metallics. “The felted texture of this board makes precise printing difficult, especially when the design is this detailed. The look we were able to achieve could typically only be done using a silk-screening process,” explains Mitchell Kaneff, president of Arkay Packaging.
Walter Shiels, COO of Arkay Packaging, explains how the challenges were overcome, without revealing too many secrets. “We incorporated special custom cylinders into our flexo units. These cylinders were needed to apply the right amount of inks and ingredients onto the paper,” Shiels says. Precision was required to achieve a very clean-looking, ultrathin line, while using embossed gold hot stamping.
“Everything went smoothly because the team at Arden is incredibly easy to communicate with,” says Kaneff. “Personally, I was also very impressed with how involved Hilary wanted to be. She definitely expressed how she wanted the carton to look every step of the way,” he says.