News

It’s the season of sporadic sun, summer holidays and sunburnt skin. And while the designers and makers of this year’s sun care packs will have done all their hard work long ago, it’s the perfect time to check out the results.

Boots is a good place to start. Its own brand Soltan is the UK’s best-selling sunscreen range and the firm is credited with creating the sun protection factor (SPF) scale used so widely.

The variety of packaging formats used by Soltan means there’s something to appeal to almost everyone. Takeaways packs 75ml of sunscreen into stand-up pouches with a screw-on lid, designed for easy packing into suitcases and likely disposal before the end of the holiday. Soltan Sensitive comes in a 200ml rigid plastic bottle with a spray fitting and polypropylene overcap produced by Zeller Plastik, as part of the Soltan 2007 redesign. Traditional lotions come in squeezable 50ml tubes with screw caps, or larger 200ml bottles with flip tops. And last year, Boots teamed up with a leading UK pub chain to provide free samples of Soltan in sachets to prevent beer gardens across the UK becoming sun-burn central.

This own brand is a good indicator of wider market trends. Peta Conn, global packaging manager at Euromonitor International, says spray-on formats are doing well, but argues that the key focus for innovation has shifted to clear applications, rather than traditional white creams. And the packaging industry has responded with an increased use of spray bottles with clear strips down the side, to enable customers to see the clear liquid inside.

In 2007, 45.8 million rigid plastic bottles were used compared to 30.6 million in 2002, while flexible packaging and stand-up pouches made an impact on this market for the first time. In fact, the suncream market is growing despite the bad weather. Sun care sales grew by 10% in value and 5% in volume in 2007. In 2002, the total UK sun care retail market was worth £235.1m, but by 2007 this had risen to £348.1m, with sun protection accounting for £264m of this, fake tans and assorted after-sun products accounting for the rest.

Conn attributes the growth to consumers putting a higher importance on looking after their skin. Products with higher SPFs continued to drive sales, with high-profile campaigns and advertising increasing the awareness of the dangers of the sun.

Red is traditionally associated with danger, but Boots’ high-street rival Superdrug found the colour worked for its Solait sun care packs, when it commissioned design consultancy Inovus to redesign them in 2006.

Kevin Johnson, creative director at Inovus, says: We wanted to give Solait its own colour so that Superdrug could block it on shelf and customers could see it clearly in store. But why choose red? There’s an unwritten rule that sun care should not be packed in red, says Johnson. The colour is a warning sign, aggressive, it suggests burning. The challenge we set ourselves was to bring out the warmth of the sun through using red.

Johnson says the brave colour choice paid off for Superdrug. It’s been a phenomenal success. In the first year after it launched, sales were up by 47%. They went up 60% on that the following year, outstripping market growth by some margin, and that’s without a big advertising budget and without it being stocked anywhere else but Superdrug. And last year the packs won a silver Design Effectiveness award from the DBA.

David Beard, creative director at Brandhouse, says meeting new European Commission guidelines on sunscreen labelling is the next opportunity for designers to distinguish their sun care packs (see box). In 2004, Beard worked on the packs for Blockhead sun protection, creating a range of sun protection and after-suns for sporty types, then subsequently a kids’ range.

We saw its target audience was the surf, skate and skiing fraternity. So we did not want to clutter up the packs with jargon, Beard says. We wanted to show ‘this is a factor whatever’ and keep it as minimal as possible, then we graded the colours depending on the intensity of protection.

Beard adds that there’s an opportunity in this market to produce packs that are more beneficial to the consumer. For example, you need to use an incredible amount of cream, something like an amount the size of a golf ball, to get the level of protection it says on the pack. There’s an opportunity here for packaging to make it intuitive that this amount is dispensed each time.

Battle of the bands
Packs that make it easier for active people to use sun protection are becoming a key part of any sun care range. New Zealand-based Fiona Stollman wanted to make a product that would remind young people to use and reapply sun protection so she set up Myozone and designed a wristband pack for 50ml of sunscreen. The SunBracelet is sold across Australia and New Zealand and has just secured a worldwide distribution deal. One stockist is AAC Wristbands, an online retailer. Sharryn Mason, marketing executive, says: AAC loved the concept of wearing the sunscreen dispenser on your wrist, making it readily available and easily accessible. Piz Buin has also taken up the wristband format.

ZO1, another Australian sun care brand, wanted to communicate the scientific credentials of its products. Simon Dovar of Jawa and Midwich designed packs with hexagonal imagery to convey the technical qualities. Yellow and orange shades are used on the sunscreens and greys on after-suns. Our approach is to go against what others have done, says Dovar. But there’s only so far you can go. We don’t want to alienate the product from potential buyers.

The results won a Wallpaper* Best New Beauty Product award in 2006, and the products have been stocked by retailers including Selfridges and Harvey Nichols.

The backs of the packs are largely determined by legislation. There are so many regulations to consider, and the ingredients need to fit, too. We chose to put these in two simple columns and used hexagonal shapes again to break bits of information out into manageable chunks, explains Dovar. The bottles used are off-the-shelf shapes, but some innovative choices have been made for this year’s new sports range. One bottle features an industrial climber’s hook on the top so it can be attached to a bag or belt.

Euromonitor’s Conn says the science behind sun products is having an increasing impact on their packs: Sun care is blurring into skin care and cosmetics. Daily sun care came into focus as cosmetics brands, particularly in the premium segment, used the addition of SPF 15 to their cosmetics as a selling point.

One such example is Innovative Skincare, which has packed a powder sunscreen in a bottle complete with retractable brush, for easy application.

It seems that the sun care spotlight is a place many brands want to be, but with increasing legislation and products featuring ever more clever ingredients, it’s a tough market in which to stand out. Still, anyone who’s brave enough to take on the challenge of designing a pack that communicates the benefits of the latest hyped-up anti-jellyfish sunscreen, will surely have a knock-out on their hands.

FAKE TANS
Fake tans have traditionally followed the lead of sunscreens when it comes to pack design, but there are signs this order is turning on its head.

The retail value of self-tanning products sold in 2007 was £48.4m, more than twice its value in 2002, when it was worth only £23.2m. Piz Buin wanted to get into this expanding market early on. In 2002, when it relaunched its fake tan range, it faced a colour challenge. The brand’s sun protection was already using brown on its packs, so Piz Buin had to break with convention.

Design agency Lewis Moberly oversaw a radical redesign. Premium cartons in a pearlised ivory colour house all bottles and tubes to encourage consumers to think they were buying into an upmarket brand that was actually quite affordable. And there’s plenty of space on the cartons for detailed instructions on use.

After the redesign, Piz Buin self-tan doubled its value share in just 12 months and leapt from number three in the market to become UK brand leader. Sales stand at three times pre-relaunch level and the brand has outstripped healthy overall market growth of 56% by posting growth of 211%.

With fake tan, consumers have proved they can be brave when it comes to buying new packaging formats. They’ve embraced the wet wipe and now sunscreen is following its lead, with brands such as Spwipes using flexible sachets to pack individual wipes that are impregnated with sunscreen to make it easier for mums to get sun protection on to their kids.

SUNSCREEN LEGISLATION
Sarah Woolnough, policy manager at Cancer Research UK, says the charity is strongly supportive of the European Commission’s action to simplify sunscreen labelling across the EU in an effort to improve public health. Come 2009, suncare must be labelled in a simple transparent manner. Low protection (factors 6-10), medium (15-25), high (30-50) and very high (50+) levels of protection must each be marked on the front of packs to show the amount of UVB protection offered. A new label must also show a UVA logo as a guarantee that the product meets the minimum 1:3 ratio of UVA:UVB protection. Woolnough says: We hope the new measures will make it easier for consumers to understand sunscreen labelling, and we think that will be the case. The challenge for packaging designers is to address this legislation in an original way.