Irish Spring Rebrands, Emphasizing Products’ ‘Smell from a Nice-Smelling Place’

Since Irish Spring soap was introduced in 1970, brand owner Colgate-Palmolive has touted the distinctive original fragrance of the green-and-white deodorant bar soap targeted to men who want to smell good. Since then, the brand has added several scents and products, including a range of body wash products.

Looking to expand its appeal to a younger male consumer, Colgate-Palmolive recently tapped graphic design firm Chase Design Group and structural design company Tin Horse to work as a team with the Colgate-Palmolive Global Design Brand Group for a rebrand that better reflects stylish, modern masculinity.

The design team married the new brand promise, smell from a nice-smelling place, with the versatility of its iconic assets—a richer-green Irish Spring structure, a white brand mark, and a golden clover symbol—to create a sleek, modern look that pays homage to the brand’s legacy.

The Irish Spring bottle before and after the redesign.“Communicating the pure essence of Irish Spring required moving beyond its past and developing a discreet and stylish presence with a system that facilitates distinction between the variants,” says Steve Dunphy, executive creative director, Chase Design Group, New York.

The new body wash package design celebrates simplicity and is rooted in the brand’s cleansing power and nature’s raw beauty. A custom natural scene adorns each of the various scents, which include Original Clean along with Moisture Blast, Active Scrub, Aloe Mist, 5-in-1, Charcoal Refresh, Ultimate Wakeup, Black Mint, and Sage Cedar, for a total of 13 SKUs.

Colgate-Palmolive and Chase worked in tandem with the structural design team at Tin Horse to evolve the bottle to a sleek and sophisticated shape, allowing it to stand out on shelf from competing brands.

Irish Spring soap boxes before and after the redesign.The new, modern brand mark was designed to work with the streamlined structure and appeal to the younger male consumer. “We created a restrained aesthetic style by using a title case and bold sans-serif typography that retains the fresh white color of the old brand mark, and added a lock-up with a stylized clover in a warm golden hue. It effectively serves as a timeless symbol for the brand’s legacy,” says Dunphy.

For the bar soap, the richer green is enhanced by the new clover icon. The large multipacks provide the canvas, similar to a travel poster, highlighting the refreshing destinations of Irish Spring.

Say Monica Goodman of Colgate-Palmolive Design and Jamila Aubain of Colgate-Palmolive Marketing, “The spirit and essence of Irish Spring is coming through in a fresh new way through breathtaking layered computer-generated images of landscapes that invite you into an experience.”

Watch this video on five disruptive packaging design trends for 2021/2022 from Pentawards.