New Zealand CPG Olive Natural Skincare’s new package design uses simple, garden-like iconography to emphasize the brand’s commitment to clean, natural ingredients.
“We studied existing packaging of natural skincare, and saw that design is dominated by green and white, and by right-angled shapes,” Mark Green, CEO at Olive Natural Skincare, says in a release. “We decided to go the opposite way and introduce bright color combinations and use of naïve cutout-type shapes. These culminate in a Matisse-like garden dreamscape, and create a sense of dreaminess and nostalgia of a summer evening.”
The redesign kicked off with 11 of Olive’s over 40 skincare products’ secondary packaging retail cartons, with plans to expand the design to primary and secondary packaging for all products, Green says.
Two additional product packages have been redesigned since launch, with plans to print these new cartons this quarter. Also included in the redesign are Olive’s six Baby Skincare/Bath Time products, featuring a different design based on cartoon “MiniMonster” characters, Green says. Overall, the brand expects the transition to be complete by the end of Q1 2023.
Olive secondary packagingOlive Natural Skincare
Beyond the bright and emotive coloring and design, each carton greets the consumer with the Olive logo, product name, hero ingredients, and the brand’s two key positioning points, “Certified Natural Skincare” and “Made in New Zealand,” Green says.
The left panel “is about telling the shopper why this product is great,” Green says. “We restate the product name, link key functionality to each hero ingredient, and make our marketing statement about the product.”
On the right, the cartons lay out the products’ main certifications and sustainability statements, including Natrue natural skincare certification, Zero Carbon certification, and the brand’s GMP/ISO manufacturing standard. Flipping to the back of the carton, the consumer finds functional information including ingredients and directions.
Olive made no changes to its primary or secondary packaging materials or printing. The cartons are paperboard with snap-lock bottoms and foldover lids, supplied by a handful of box suppliers in Asia. All of the brand’s retail cartons, including ink, are fully recyclable, with plans to swap to recycled paperboard and PCR plastics on all products in the future.
The packages are CMYK printed in eight colors, prioritizing “maximum flexibility in our design,” over the “clarity or consistency that comes with PMS,” Green says. “Our design guidelines tell our designers to be bold and imaginative with color, to not just stick to the ‘what the marketing department said.’”
Olive primary packagingOlive Natural Skincare
Printing new designs on the curved surfaces of the brand’s primary packaging “can be extremely difficult and requires a designer to effectively work in three dimensions,” Green says. “And, of course, the retail box will always have more space than the bottle, tube, or jar within it. So the design needs to be compacted down. But we love the design, so we look forward to creating some really beautiful new primary packaging.”
Olive Natural Skincare’s products can currently be found in 2,000 Rite Aid Pharmacy stores, 1,000 CVS Pharmacy stores, and online at olivenaturalskincare.com.
