Packaging issues

One word about bananas: Their packaging is perfect. Reasonable protection, easy unpacking and a truly honest envelope: You know what you’ll get. Contrary to some citrus fruits where you peel your basket ball sized grapefruit for hours and end up with a tennis ball like dry piece of something.

With the decision on the flacon taken, the last three days saw a first round towards packaging and labelling. There is a sensual and emotional element to all of this, linking a customer’s buying process with the end product. As we sell a substantial share of our products to clients directly on the internet, the packaging might be the first physical encounter between the real thing and a patient customer. This encounter, together with the visual aesthetics and the textual messages seen before in a web store environment, will -I am convinced- influence the overall impression of a fragrance. Of course, the most important parameter for me is the scent, the composition, followed by the composition and the scent, the scent and once again the scent. No compromise there: But somewhere down the line comes the story around a scent. And this story is linked to the packaging and visual/textual messages therein.

Then there is another aspect that I need to consider: Practicability. And simplicity: We need things to remain producible and affordable. Affordable in the sense that for every Dollar/Euro/Franc we spend more on packaging, we have to ask at least a Dollar/Euro/Franc more from our customers. Basically we would have to ask for more money for a shell around the perfume that a client will through away immediately anyhow.

You remember: One of the key motivations to do what I do is to set a contrapunto, a counter point; I want to make perfumes that are guided by a love for scents. I want to make perfumes that are honest with an honest price tag to them. I want to invest into the materials that go in them rather the materials that make the packaging.

Thus, a first draft of a packaging:
Cardboard box, solid, white. A flyer, fitting the size of the cardboard box, printed two sided, standard flyer format. The top side shown on the picture goes on top of the cardboard box. A rope made of natural sisal holds things in place. In my eyes: Simple and honest.


The cool thing about this flyer: It gives product info on the other side and it might serve as sample flyer, too. Holding the glued on sample spray bottles on the other side … more shown here tomorrow….