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Design software speeds time to shelf by 50%

Cosmetics marketer Mary Kay uses design rendering software to produce a photorealistic image of a unique, faceted fragrance bottle, eliminating the need for a physical sample.

Mary Kay used rendering software to speed approval of the package design for its Fearless Collection of fragrances.
Mary Kay used rendering software to speed approval of the package design for its Fearless Collection of fragrances.

New package design—from initial concept to full-scale production—can oftentimes be a long and laborious process, involving research, 2D sketches, CAD drawings, structural analysis, buy-in from stakeholders, prototypes, focus groups, and more. At any point, designers may need to take a step back in the process to tweak or rework a design. All of this can be costly and can considerably delay a product’s launch into the marketplace.

Mary Kay, a 55-year-old multilevel marketing company that offers skincare, fragrance, and color cosmetics products, has a long history of innovation, holding more than 1,400 patents for products, technologies, and packaging. While not sold on store shelves, Mary Kay’s more than 200 SKUs still rely heavily on packaging design to enhance its products and woo female consumers. Product samples and catalogs full of enticing product images are essential tools for the more than 3.5 million beauty care consultants who sell Mary Kay products in 36 countries worldwide.

Competition in the cosmetics space is stiff, making speed to market just as vital for Mary Kay as for any retail brand owner. In 2007, the company’s design staff implemented Solidworks® Professional 3D design software from Dassault Systemes to provide them with advanced product development tools. Yet, according to Mary Kay Senior Industrial Designer Jenny DeMarco Staab, requests for improved visualization of design concepts and demand for higher levels of realism in design imagery continued.

In 2012, Mary Kay added to its software design toolkit Dassault’s Solidworks Visualize® photorealistic imaging software, which was instrumental in the successful launch of its Fearless Collection of fragrances in Brazil in 2016. With Solidworks Visualize, Mary Kay was able to accelerate approvals of the Fearless Collection package design concept, leverage a rendering of the package for internal reviews, and reduce packaging development time by 50%.

Greater realism equals faster approvals

Mary Kay’s first software product from Dassault, Solidworks Professional 3D, is “basically Solidworks CAD,” according to Brian Hillner, Solidworks Product Portfolio Manager. “It’s design software that allows the user to very quickly and easily create 3D shapes and engineering components. While you can apply materials like plastic, wood finish, metal, and glass, as well as others, the results aren’t quite photoreal. Even screenshots are not photorealistic.”

This lack of realism greatly hindered Mary Kay’s designers in getting approval on designs in a timely manner. “Solidworks Professional 3D provided us with an efficient tool for designing products and getting things done, but we continued to have issues involving the difficulty key team members experienced in extrapolating design concepts from CAD images or 2D drawings,” says Staab. “It was hard for marketing and our international team to grasp concepts, and it took additional time to create physical models, both of which slowed down approvals.”

Notes Hillner, physical models based only on CAD drawings may often require numerous iterations. “For example, you might get a sample back and say, ‘I should have made the wall thickness two millimeters instead of four, because now the bottle looks so thick and clunky, and it has really strange refractions in this particular area of the glass,’” he says. “Then you have to go back to your manufacturing team and have them prototype another sample, and then the new prototype might be closer, but still not what you want.” By then, you’ve lost time and money.

In 2012, as Staab was evaluating various software products that could provide a more realistic rendering of a package design, she learned about Solidworks Visualizer at a Dassault Solidworks World Conference and Exhibition. “What really sold me on Solidworks Visualize software was the ‘glass’ quality—how real it makes glass bottles look,” she stresses. “We do a lot with glass and plastics, and we need a tool that provides the most photorealistic images possible. With the other packages, the glass quality was really not there, so we chose to standardize on Solidworks Visualize.”

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