In Closing: Hand-Woven Wonder
For his new fragrance, John Varvatos brought old-world craftsmanship to the fragrance industry.
By Jennifer Kwok, EditorOne look at John Varvatos’s new Artisan fragrance bottle will have customers asking, “How did they do that?” From the glass bottle’s base all the way up to the bottle’s narrow neck, the entire surface of the bottle is covered in a woven rattan wrap.
Customers and packaging professionals alike may speculate that some new, automated packaging process was used to create the wrap. After all, it’s difficult to imagine a project like this being accomplished by hand, one bottle at a time. However, the wrap was not only hand woven, but also hand applied, confirm John Varvatos representatives.
“Each bottle’s wrap is hand woven by one artisan,” says Maria Christofilis, executive director of marketing for JV Fragrances & Skincare, a subsidiary of Shiseido. “This makes each bottle special and not identical to another bottle. The rattan is woven directly onto the bottle. You can imagine the process.” Baltic Linen Co. (Lake Success, NY) produced the wrap at its facility in China.
The rattan is perfectly and tightly woven around the bottle, with no gaps between the wrap and the bottle. “The rattan-weaving process is the same hand process used in basket weaving,” says Diana Piccola, creative development consultant for JV Fragrances & Skincare. “The rattan is applied to the base of the glass first and is woven upward onto the bottle. The finished ends of the rattan are tied at the bottle’s neck.” This represented Baltic Linen’s first packaging job for the fragrance industry.
Artisan’s glass bottle was made from the same flask-shaped mold used for John Varvatos’s other men’s fragrances—Classic and Vintage. Vitro Packaging (Plano, TX) supplies all of those bottles.
The bottle’s substantial zamac cap was produced by Metal Dynamics (Cranston, RI). “John wanted the feel to be a hammered, worn-metal look, with all the beautiful imperfections of something that is hand made,” says Christofilis. “Artisan has an organic, natural feel to it, and the cap needed to fit that feeling.”
Piccola describes the cap-production process. First, the zamac was plated with a special coating to give the metal a blackened look. Next, a tumbling process was used to remove the black coating, exposing the pewter base, and adding a distressed look to the cap. Piccola says that the biggest challenge was achieving the right color finish.
The carton, produced by Arkay Packaging (New York City), was given the look of linen. To create a linen-like texture, the matte side of the solid-bleached board stock was used on the carton’s outside. The linen pattern was achieved using four-color printing and two levels of embossing. Two levels of foil stamping were used to print the logos, ensuring they were legible against the linen-print background.
As one can imagine, with all of the handwork involved, this project required a lot of lead time to accomplish. “Understanding and convincing ourselves that this could be done was the biggest challenge,” says Christofilis. “Our initial response was that this would be impossible, but when you are dealing with such a talented and well-respected factory, we realized it was possible.”