Six products, one box, no reprint

The problem

Laminaire harvests seaweed in Brittany and turns it into six skincare products. They add roughly one a year, and each new product used to mean a new carton, a new die, a new artwork file and a minimum order of five thousand units for something they might sell eight hundred of in the first season.

The range also had a legibility problem of its own making: every product had its own colour, so on a shelf of six there was no Laminaire, only six unrelated boxes that happened to share a small logotype.

What we did

One die per volume, three volumes for the whole range. The carton is the constant. What varies is a single printed band whose position on the box encodes the family: high for the face products, middle for the body, low for the hair.

Colour is used once, not everywhere. The box is uncoated board in its natural colour, printed in one ink plus the band. This is cheaper, it survives the bathroom better than a laminated white box, and it makes six products look like one house from two metres away, which is the distance that decides a purchase.

The artwork is a template with the regulatory text already positioned, so a new product is a new band and a new panel of copy, not a new project.

What it changed

Packaging cost per unit fell thirty eight per cent, mostly by removing the laminate and the second die. A new formula now reaches a printed carton in about nine days.

Two products have been added since, both by the client, without a call to us.