Says Product Development Director for the company Jenna Arkin, a bottle design refresh from a stock to custom structure provided Earth Friendly Products with a perfect opportunity to highlight one of the hand soap’s most unique features: its clarity.
“Many hand soaps on the market use artificial colors and pearlizing agents that have no real benefit and are synthetic pollutants,” Arkin says. “We thought the best way to highlight this product attribute and use it to our advantage was to utilize the ‘3D’ space within the bottle to reflect light through the front and back labels.”
Earth Friendly Products designed the 12-sided structure in-house, overcoming several obstacles. The first was the blow molding of the bottle. According to Arkin, PET has its limitations in that certain angles are too sharp and collapse in blow molding. “With all of the sharp angles in the bottle, we weren’t sure it would be feasible from an engineering standpoint. We really pushed the boundaries of what blow molding can do with this bottle.”
To prepare for full production of the package, Earth Friendly Products’ proprietary bottle supplier started with a single-cavity mold and corrected any imperfections before moving on. According to Arkin, the first run went pretty smoothly, with only minor tweaks to the design.
Another challenge was bottle decoration. The idea was to add a colored label on the back of the bottle that would provide a “shine-through” effect when coupled with the bottle’s many facets. To achieve this required a lot of trial and error, Arkin notes. The back label was also a bit difficult to design because the company wanted to add a lot of information in a small space. The solution was a peel-away two-ply pressure-sensitive label printed in two colors.
Both the front and back label are decorated with botanical images, different for each of the three aromas in the line, that “telegraph to the consumer all of the plant-derived goodness that each bottle contains,” Arkin says. “Hand soap is a very sensory experience, both tactile and olfactory, and we wanted to get consumers exited about the botanical scents with illustrations of the plants that inspired the aromas.”
To highlight the three varieties—Orange Blossom, Lavender, and Lemongrass—Earth Friendly Products also added a colored dispensing pump that matches the color of each label.
Along with the aesthetic features of the dodecahedron bottle—which make it a stand out on shelf, as well as on a consumer’s kitchen or bathroom sink—the unique shape also provides several functional features. Among them, the bottle can be rested on its side, allowing the consumer to dispense the soap right over the sink without spillage. It is also stackable in dozens of ways, and it fits great in the hand, “much like an apple,” says Arkin.
The new 12.5-oz hand soap bottle was introduced in stores and online in fall 2015, with both retailers and consumers enjoying “the uniqueness and playfulness of the bottle,” Arkin relates. “As it hits more stores, we can’t wait to see the consumer feedback.”
