After acquiring a chain of salons in the Midwest that had been founded by hairstylist Mario Tricoci, Elizabeth Arden Spas reformulated Tricoci’s hair care line with natural ingredients and then wanted to rebrand it for a national launch.

WHAT’S IN A NAME?
The initial name for the hair care line, Portrait, was established when Elizabeth Arden asked Alexander Isley (www.alexanderisley.com)—a design consultancy based in Cincinnati—to work on packaging for the line. The first thing Isley did was suggest a name change. It was a bold move for sure, but one motivated by a strong conviction. Isley was convinced the name wouldn’t appeal to the 30- to 45-year-olds Arden had in mind as target customers. Since the line is meant to be combined by consumers to match their hair types, the new name became obvious: Match.

“We really felt that the name Portrait was not going to speak to young women in their 30s,” says Aline Hilford, managing partner. “Portrait was more conservative, older, historic and dusty. That was the first time we had that happen, where we actually were brought in when the name was already developed.

Alexander Isley, creative director, quickly adds that a brand’s name is important, but ultimately it’s what you do with it that counts. He says, “It’s more than just a name. At a certain point, it’s what you do with it in terms of the packaging, marketing and public persona. When people think of Nike, they maybe think of the swoosh. They think of the shoes; they think of Phil Knight. They really don’t think of the Greek goddess. Magical things happen when you put $220 million a year behind marketing something.”

Before starting on any creative work for the Match brand launch, design consultancy Alexander Isley did its own research on the target audience. Creative director Alexander Isley says, “Part of our digging was to do some presentation boards of who this woman is: ‘What’s she like?’ and ‘What does she do?’ It helped show our understanding and gave us weight when it came to making our recommendations, not only in terms of the name, but visually.” Aline Hilford, managing partner, says that Isley had the luxury of forming a creative team that was ideally suited for the project. “It helped on our end that three of the five people working on the Match line fell within the target [market] and sort of knew the mind-set of this woman that they were going after.”

MODERN CHARACTERS
Even though Elizabeth Arden wouldn’t be putting that kind of money behind its new hair care line, the company agreed that Match was a better fit. With the new name in place, Isley then got down to business. First, the firm experimented with a font or logo treatment for the brand. After trying several different font iterations, Isley settled on Venus. Ironically enough, it’s a typeface from the early 1900s.

“The letters have character to them, and we felt that got back to what we were trying to do with the overall packaging, where it’s very clean and simple, but graphic,” Isley says. “When you look closely, you see this interesting pattern, and the letters have a little bit of quirkiness to them. I guess it is ironic that [we used] a very old typeface, but we wanted something simple. And we wanted people to see it and not think twice about it.”

The type design had to convey specific brand attributes to the intended audience for Match, including: simplicity, freshness and modernity. Designers tried several sans serif fonts, but ultimately landed with Venus, a typeface from the early 1900s.

UNIQUE COMPLEXION
After the logo treatment was chosen, Hilford says the packaging design came down to a choice between two approaches. “One approach was having the difference be the color or having four different colors to work from based on one [overall] pattern,” Hilford says. “The other option was one color with a few different patterns, and in the end, that’s what we ended up going with.”

Isley says the design team considered Pantone colors initially, but ultimately decided on a customized pearlescent blue. “Sometimes the Pantone colors are limiting, and there was an effect we were looking for. We wanted to specify something that would be a signature color,” Isley says.

Although the Match line is not organic, the ingredients are based on natural elements of waterbased products. That led designers to look for inspiration in natural elements such as botanical imagery, herbs, grasses and even tea leaves.

Yet it was important not to use a pattern that was instantly recognizable, so as not to mislead consumers into believing the product was organic. “We didn’t want people to look at [the package] and say, ‘Well, that’s a beet,’” Isley says. “‘Where’s the beet inside this product?’ But instead we wanted to seem more natural and free-form.”

Isley also created most of the remaining merchandising materials and collateral for the line, all of which mimic the products’ patterns, colors and finishes. “I think everything took its lead from the packaging. The only real decision that we had to make beyond that was how to incorporate photos of models in with the program. Typography and the color do a lot to hold [the brand] together.”

OBVIOUS PARTNERS
Last spring, a second product was added to the line for color-treated hair: It’s called (surprise) Mix. The packaging is virtually identical to Match, except for the color, which is red. “It made more sense seeing the line on the shelf together … we felt [it] was a stronger tie-in to have Mix use the same patterns and just change the color,” says Hilford.

Isley adds that the trick with almost any creative project is deciding when to quit. “I think the hardest thing to do is to know when something is finished. I think designers, in particular, get in trouble when they have a hard time separating the creative activity and the editing. I think it’s important to experiment, but there’s a time when you need to put [ideas] out front and be the editor and weed out things that are good, but not perfect.”

It appears Isley’s work for Arden was at least near-perfect. Isley says Match has exceeded Arden’s expectations by quickly becoming its best-selling product line.

Since the brand attributes were fresh, contemporary and modern, the end result was simple in nature. “Our aim was to make [the brand] contemporary with something important to it, and that, to a lot of people, translates into clean and simple. I think that’s a pretty good thing to aim for in most cases,” Isley says. “It has got to look good on the shelf. It has got to be something you can print and reproduce easily, and all of these things tend toward a simplified approach.”

For the various patterns on the packaging, Isley was careful not to use something clearly recognizable. “We wanted to bridge the gap between being abstract and being grounded in reality,” Isley says. “We could have easily used the same pattern on every single one of [the packages], but we wanted a more subtle level to show that there’s a whole system that works together when you look at it from a distance.”

Hilford is quick to assert that the process contributes to the success. “I think the crux of it is, we really have a process that we follow, and we really try to get in the mind of who that target is and understand the brand as much as we possibly can—or the need for the new brand,” Hilford says. “That starts with an input session, or sessions, with the client and really picking their brains and trying to know everything that we possibly can know about [the brand] before we go about diving into development.”

Isley says that had he been locked into working with the original name instead of Match, his approach wouldn’t have changed much at all. “I think the overall sensibility wouldn’t have been changed because the sensibility wasn’t something that we manufactured from thin air,” says Isley. “We tried to take the attributes of the line and also take into account who the audience is in formulating not only the name, but the [overall] look.”

The decision to use one color and different patterns on the packaging was influenced by a second line of products called Mix. “There is this line extension called Mix, [and] we felt a better tie-in was to have Mix using the same patterns [as Match] and just change the color for Mix,” Hilford says.

On the shelf, the system lets the products interact with one another, further emphasizing the Match name and concept. “Ideally we wanted these things to be displayed together, but there’s not a guarantee,” Isley says. “They might be broken apart, in which case I think it becomes even more important that you can reaffirm to people that it’s part of a line.”

About the author
Rodney J. Moore, a freelance journalist turned communications and PR strategist whose specialty is crafting and making media pitches for companies and individuals, is the founder of Moore Creative Communications. He is the author of Design Secrets: Layout, and he is working on his second nonfiction book.