phyto 3000 Le baume
packaging design
Whether it’s to continue to appeal to consumers, maintain its place alongside competitors or keep up with the market rythm, there always comes a time in the life of a brand to update its visual identity.
But, when your clientele knows you for a very specific product, it’s even more difficult to change its design. The process is very delicate but necessary to last!
The Laboratoire Phyto 3000, trusted us with this precious mission!
The company is evolving and we already started to renew their brand identity. So the products also needed a fresh start.
Phyto 3000 is selling 3 different plant based products: the balm, oil in roll-on & oil in spray. Faced with the success of the balm, the oils are struggling. How to increase brand potential by improving product segmentation?
To recognize brand identity elements
The Balm is the Laboratoire Phyto 3000 best seller, a strong plant based balsam well-known for its emblematic tiger (also called Tiger balm or Chinese balsam) it’s relieving a wide range of aches and pains.
Its design is getting old, we need to fresh it up to make it more appealing for a young audience without loosing its faithful clientele!
First step is to identify the visual codes to guide our graphic propositions: the tiger fur on the background, the tiger head in the center & the colored circle underneath to support.
The goal? That the changes are invisible from a distance but obvious once in hand.
Inspired by the product history and its clientele
The balm packaging design, also known as Chinese balsam or Tiger balm, usually gets its design from chinese strong visual elements.
For this re-design, the Laboratoire Phyto 3000 wanted to mix chinese traditional culture with occidental pharmaceutical. Their recipe is not 100% traditional chinese balm but gets occidental phytotherapy touches. We decided to keep the ancestral look and feel with a little premium and modern plus.
After an in-depth graphic exploration of alternative medicine, phytotherapy and the world of the apothecaries of yesteryear, the customer made her choice.
Relooking without loosing the product identity
From the existing color palet, we started a meticulous redesign. The background, orange or beige depending on the reference, is now textured to refer to ancient herbalist vials and its handwriting paper labels on which we scribbled tiger stripes. The tiger fur is now suggested in a more artistic way.
We draw a new tiger face in a engraved style, his look and expression inspire power and prestige giving the packaging a majestic and statutory image. On either side of the head, we disposed plants like a crown. That way we put the ingredient at the heart of the product which draws all its strength and power from them. Finally the colored circle supports and highlights the new illustrations.
When it came to choosing typefaces, we were inspired by the bottles used by apothecaries in the past, and opted for a combination of two ‘traditional’ fonts. The first, a serif font in capitals, is used for the product name and evokes both history and professionalism, giving it character and elegance. The second, a handwritten font, refers to calligraphic apothecary vials and brings back the human touch.
To accompany the product’s move upmarket, we recommended changing the cap to a metal version and we designed the engraving of the tiger’s head to be embossed on it.
Subtle changes made with attention to detail to reinforce the historical credibility of the product and the quality of its formula.
From a distance, the two designs are very similar, so we’re retaining our regular customers, while improving the image and visual quality of the packaging.
Reviewing a product position
In the Laboratoire Phyto 3000 range of products, two of them are living side by side with the balm: oils in Roll-on and oils in spray.
Too often considered to be a simple oils version of the balm, these products do not enjoy the success and image they deserve.
Yet they have their own advantages and benefits, a high concentration and multiple virtues that need to be brought to the fore. Our job is to build an identity for each one.
We recommend separate them in order to avoid cannibalism: Roll-on oils are separated from spray oils to allow each to reveal its full potential.
Roll-on oils with its format allows targeted massage application to treat pain in specific areas of the body.
Its strength versus the balm? An even richer and more intense concentration of plants, providing a warming or cooling effect, which is sought after for the relief of muscular and joint pain.
Create a unified product range
We use these roll-on oils as a more technical product, emphasising their thermic effects, and we apply the graphic structure created for the balm to the roll-on label, adapting it to its bottle. The design leans more towards modern pharmaceutical products and less towards the traditional aspect of the balm, in order to target a wider audience who are less familiar with herbal treatments but are looking for something more natural.
To instil the notion of warmth into this product, we are using the colour codes of Red Balm, reversing the predominance of orange with red.
The oil, formerly known as ‘white’, takes a completely different direction, focusing solely on muscle relief thanks to its cooling properties.
We’ve left the product’s respiratory qualities as a secondary message, as the roll-on method of application is less suited to them.
In design terms, the container is significant, and in this case suggests a fairly wide application to an area of the body such as the large muscles of the legs, back or arms, and is therefore less suited to the respiratory benefits.
A cool blue evokes the invigorating and soothing cold effect of the massage. As with the balm, plants play a central role in the pack. They are even more prominent in the oils because there are more of them and they are more concentrated in the formula. The tiger’s head is a signature feature, as is the tiger skin that surrounds the product as a reminder of its identity.
In this way, we have created a family of products, each with a clear identity, whose unique properties and benefits are highlighted.
A // Benchmark
B // Iconographic research
C // Moodboard creation
D // Illustrations
E // Color palet composition
F // Typography research
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