Structural Design/Branding and Packaging for a range of natural fragrances created in Bondi Beach, Australia.

The Brief:
To create branding and packaging both structural as well as graphic for a range of new natural fragrances created in Bondi Beach, Australia. The brand celebrates women. Recreation is a feeling of freedom, a wash of colour in a grey world, a personal treat. It's for women who lead healthy active lifestyles and believe in self improvement and preserving the planet.

The Solution:
Recreation Beauty commissioned us to create a brand with attitude and confidence for those sophisticated, glamorous bohemians who believe in inner freedom, strength and natural beauty.

With that,the brand mark embodies female empowerment. The stylised ‘R’ is inspired by the iconic image of the woman sleeve rolled up, from the WW2 ‘We Can Do It’ campaign. The ‘R’, the visual shorthand for Recreation dominates the packaging as the brands’ hallmark of confidence. The infill of the mark, a subtle pink, blue and yellow graduation, echoes the twilight beach skies of Bondi.

The word mark uses rigorously even fine line typography that uses geometric shapes and clear definition.

An asymmetric layout has been purposefully used to give the packaging sufficient ‘tension’ for the three visual elements to work both together and in isolation within the space. The vertical type describing the fragrance is through its orientation and font style given a unique visible position without it overshadowing the brand mark elements.

With the bottle design we explored the intrinsic beauty of basic geometry. Arriving at a bottle that is a softened hexagon. The solid clear pedestal gives it visual gravitas. We wanted the bottle to have a simple beauty, nothing over engineered. For it to nestle in the hand but have some weight—playing on the perception of value based on weight—heavier things always feel more expensive. The subtle vertical chime lines give the bottle a soft rhythm and the illusion that it is a much rounder shape while affording it a clever twist of faceted sides. (Not dissimilar to a cut gemstone.) The sides give leverage for branding placement and engagement.

The debossed aluminium cap sits flush against the bottles’ shoulder, assisting with optimising the over all proportions. The base is also debossed with the ‘R’ as a point of unexpected discovery for the consumer.

The boxes are printed CMYK, with two spot colours, on an uncoated stock with a spot gloss UV and an all over satin aqueous varnish. The spot gloss afforded a subtle glint that appears and disappears according to the angle at which the box is seen. Again, a subtle nod to the unique beach light as it dances across various surfaces.