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Güd brings ‘eco-fun’ to natural personal care category

A new brand from Burt’s Bees puts the focus on fragrance and targets a younger female consumer through bright, contemporary graphics and fun product personalities.

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Fragrant, fun, modern, irreverent: These are the primary brand attributes Burt’s Bees had in mind when it developed a completely new natural personal care brand targeted at the millennial female consumer. Durham, NC-based Burt’s Bees has offered earth-friendly natural skin, beauty, and personal care products for more than 25 years with tremendous commercial success, based on a clinical-oriented platform. Its new güd brand (pronounced good) pioneers a new category in natural personal care: “eco-fun.”


“The main reason we wanted to launch a new brand was that we wanted to pursue our overall Burt’s Bees mission to build a natural personal care category, and invite a new consumer, a new shopper into the category,” explains Burt’s Bees marketing manager Garrett Putman. “We believe there is quite a bit of white space in natural for a brand that’s really fun, fragrant, and colorful and that appeals to a woman we would characterize as a millennial consumer. What we are trying to do is something that no one else in the natural personal care category is doing.”


From concept to store shelf, the new brand was developed within 12 months, including the design of custom packaging structures, as well as the creation of bright, imaginative flower-motif labels that convey the radiant personality of the brand.


Fragrance is key


In late 2011, Burt’s Bees launched güd in most major food, drug, and mass retailers in three varieties: Floral Cherrynova, Orange Petalooza, and Vanilla Flame. A fourth fragrance, Pearanormal Activity, is available exclusively in Target stores. Each scent platform includes eight product categories—shampoo, conditioner, body wash, body butter, body lotion, body mist, foaming hand wash, and hand cream—all of which are paraben-, phthalate-, and petrochemical-free.


Notes Putman, product lineup is another area where güd distinguishes itself from the Burt’s Bees brand, which is focused more on lip care, lip color, and body and face care. “Güd is really more about body care, hair care, and hand care—categories where fragrance is really important,” he says.


The brand name, güd, came from Burt’s Bees’ branding agency, Baldwin&, and was chosen for its feel-good appeal. “These products work good, they smell good, and they make you feel good,” says Putman, “so we really thought the brand name was a nice fit for what we were trying to build.” The unique spelling of the name—it uses a “u” with an umlaut in place of the double “o”—is meant to represent a smiley face.


Baldwin& also worked with Burt’s Bees to design the package structures and label graphics, which were vetted through focus groups made up of “millennial beauty enthusiasts,” according to Burt’s Bees creative project manager Julie Colon. As she explains, the focus groups helped the güd team answer three questions related to the package design. First, whether the design evoked an eco-fun, irreverent personality; second, if the design offered a “wow” factor not currently seen in the natural personal care category; and third, if the brand architecture provided easy shoppability for the consumer.


“One of the things that we learned from our focus groups was that in the designs we showed them that used a vertical type format for the fragrance names, the positioning of the copy really started to create a story by connecting it with the illustrations on the packaging,” says Colon. “The consumers began to make the connection between the design and the personality of the brand.”

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