Bond No. 9 High Line

Found this fragrance brand that uses a New York neighborhood as an inspiration for its brand packaging. Really helpful!

http://www.thedieline.com/blog/2010/03/bond-no-9-high-line.html

My target audience

After reading many many articles, Mintel reports and visual research, I've finally managed to pin down on my target audience for the fragrance brand that I'm going to be creating. This is the consumer lifestyle board that explains my target consumer. This is based  on a fictitious person I had in mind although, Stuart suggested that I take an actual person in mind and make a consumer lifestyle board, so thats in the process.

Serge Mansau

Serge Mansau is an internationally recognised designer in the perfume industry, where he has been designing bottles for famous couturiers since 1963. Containers for the most celebrated fragrances have come out of the studio of this magician of the transparent (Hermès, Kenzo, Cerruti and Azzaro).With all this experience, Serge Mansau is an expert when it comes to glass. He explores it with master glassmakers and is familiar with all its physical possibilities and limits. This explains his great skill with the material, and the freedom with which he reinvents sculpture. Serge Mansau has a liking for marginal approaches and the impulse of intuitive gestures. He kept his artistic productions secret for a long time. Now revealed to the general public, his works form part of the history of contemporary glass.

Serge Mansau An artist with a passion for theatre and stage engineering from which he draws inspiration for his creations. His works are instinctive and spontaneous; they are the fruit of total artistic freedom.

(http://www.beautrading.nl/pdf/artist/Mansau_Serge_GB.pdf)

Poison and Euphoria

Over the past few weeks, I've been looking at the fragrance market, the trends used, the visual language used by designer brands etc. I created a small comparative analysis between two luxury fragrances- 'Poison' by Christian Dior which is an older, more classic fragrance and 'Euphoria' by Calvin Klein which is a newer fragrance.

The first of the Poison collection was launched in 1985 and was followed by four other versions - Tendre Poison (1994), Hypnotic Poison (1998), Pure Poison (2004) and the latest being Midnight Poison (2007). The original Poison was a very strong fragrance and it created a great stir among consumers as women were forbidden to appear wearing Poison in public.

"Moreover, Dior Poison appeared to be the first fragrance of the French House that did not have the word 'Dior' in its name; the 'God Father' of this new fragrance was the French poet Paul Valéry who wrote sometime back that 'perfume is poison for heart'. Provocative and intensive aroma that arouses so emotional responses was called 'Poison' not just for nothing. This bright, charismatic and seducing aroma is difficult to ignore and forget. Rodger Morris, the

President to Parfums Christian Dior, remarked at a time that so conflicting name of Dior Poison perfume was intended purposefully, "I was realizing that we could afford being conflicting to the extent while the aroma seems gracious." (http://www.luxemag.org/skin-body/dior-poison.html)

The bottle shape is inspired by Cinderella's Pumpkin coach, and there are various versions of it. The collectors version of the bottle carries fine tendril shape designs on its surface.

The second perfume I looked at for my analysis was 'Euphoria' by Calvin Klein which was launched in the year 2005. Euphoria was created as a lighter fragrance to suit Asian preferences although it was launched globally. There were many versions of this fragrance as well - Euphoria, 'Euphoria Blossom' and 'Euphoria Spring temptation'. This was targeted at modern young women and was a sweet-smelling, light, floral perfume. The bottle shape is inspired by the orchid flower about to bloom, uses light shades of pink and the collectors version of this bottle was decorated using accents of swarowski crystals.

Lux: Indian caleidoscope

While I've been pondering over what possible themes and inspirations I could use for the creation of a luxury perfume brand, I came across this very interesting article about how the LUX brand is diversifying from a soap brand to a cosmetic brand for the indian audience. I've been trying to trace the designers of this range of packaging.

Here's the link to the article.

http://popsop.com/6666

A reflection of the PGC phase

This phase has been very interesting and a different experience for me. Coming from a different country and culture, I have a learnt a lot in the past couple of weeks. Starting with the "needs-must" project, I learnt how to work within a multi-disciplinary framework and how different people contribute different things to create a successful project. Contrary, to my professional experience before coming to the UK, where my colleagues were all from similar backgrounds, this was a different experience for me as I got to work with students from various backgrounds,cultures and interests.

As for my project, I had a basic idea of what I wanted to do as a part of my MA, but after researching and reading up on various articles, I realized that I had to narrow down my area of interest. I was extremely puzzled as I wanted to research into a varied number of topics and had no idea where to start or finish. This is where the tutorials came in, these tutorials helped me narrow down and focus on one topic that combined all of my interests. The discussions we had with each other and with Stuart, helped me get a clearer picture of what I wanted to do. Hence, I chose to create Brand identity and packaging for a luxury perfume brand as well as promotional material for the same. After deciding on the topic, I have been reading various books/journals/articles, looking at various designers/design companies to see how they have gone about carrying the whole design process, creating mood-boards, dabbling on various ideas etc.

The design process project was an unique experience as we worked on a brief for a period of 3 weeks, and it was really nice to see how our ideas and designs changed over that period. We gave and received feedback on each other's work and it was a great experience.

This phase has been a very busy and useful one,starting with a very confused state of mind, I' am now a lot clearer and now know what exactly I want to do for the next two terms. I hope to use what I've learnt this phase effectively and will continue learning through this MA.

Echo

http://www.karimrashid.com/

I've been looking at some famous package designs for fragrances and I noticed that Karim Rashid is a very prominent designer whose created some great packaging for brands like Issey Miyake, Hugo boss, Kenzo etc.

I found his packaging for Davidoff Echo, a fragrance for women, particularly interesting. The bottle is smooth and pebble-shaped with a pink tint and appears to be hollow in the center to give it a talisman-like quality. Its very feminine and absolutely magical.