Haircare packs: A family affair

The UK haircare market was worth £1.2bn last year. If adverts for the sector’s products are to be believed, it can make you smarter, more successful and more attractive. But, in the supermarket, the science bit that Jennifer Aniston so successfully sold to consumers on the TV adverts goes out of the window – it is the packaging that packs the visual punch.

Tubes, bottles, tottles – the choice of shampoo and conditioner packaging formats is endless, a point global plastic packaging manufacturer Promens has attempted to prove with its 96 range. As the name suggests, the range consists of 96 combinations of bottles, tottles (top-down bottles) and sprays. The curvy shapes of the packs can fit together or mirror others in the range, which plays to the common design practice of creating a ‘family’ feel for haircare ranges.

Design agency Pi3’s creative director Dominic Hale wanted to create a family of packs when he designed the latest bottles for Procter & Gamble’s (P&G) Head & Shoulders range. The company designed the range so that the shampoo and conditioner bottles fit snugly together, and the graphics of the two bottles unite to create a single image.

I guess, in terms of design, it’s one of the unwritten rules; one’s a bottle and one’s a tottle and you try to marry them up, explains Hale. Whether that’s a direct mirror or the pack is inverted, the aim is to make them look like a pair. What we are saying is the product is first about cleaning and then conditioning.

Pi3 has worked with the Head & Shoulders brand for 10 years. In that time, the agency has taken the range from being an anti-dandruff brand to something more cosmetic. There are so few things used in the bathroom that you want them to look good, says Hale. The only limitation is cost.

The current difficult economic conditions mean that, more than ever, cost is paramount for packaging buyers, and this has had an effect on the number of brands willing to re-package their ranges and the cost of the packaging they invest in. Promens’ IMD director personal health and care division Isabelle Orhan says: The trend is not very favourable to innovation or value-added packaging. It’s a pity and I hope it will be a temporary step.

New to market
However, there are still new designs coming to market. When Herbal Essences decided to revamp its packaging, it opted for packs that nest together. Design agency LPK was brought in to overhaul the packaging and Procter & Gamble, which owns the Herbal Essences brand, worked with LPK on the graphic design, while Oregon-based Ziba developed the bottle.
Inspiration for the new Herbal Essences packs was sought from outside the shampoo and conditioner category. Trends in cosmetics and fashion were studied and drawn on for inspiration. Perfume houses do a wonderful job at creating a world and theatre, explains LPK chief creative officer Nathan Hendricks. We’ve tried to bring that drama and imagination to a product that’s being sold in a grocery store.

One big challenge for brands in the sector is convincing women to buy conditioner and shampoo from the same range. This was a major focus for the packaging design team working with Herbal Essences, and copy was used to link the two products. The Herbal Essences woman loves to stay in the shower as long as possible, so we thought we’d give her something to do, says Hendricks. If you pick up the shampoo, there is a question on the back and you have to pick up the conditioner to get the answer.

A relationship between the bottle and tottle was established by using a curved design. The traditional apothecary cap used for the old design was abandoned in favour of a cap incorporated into the bottle, which eliminates negative space and gives the consumer the impression they are getting more for their money.

P&G’s size and scale meant it could also play around with the bottle’s colour. The design team spent time in labs with P&G developing shampoos that would interact with the bottle. The results include a yellow shampoo in a magenta bottle that appears orange when full.

Hairdresser Tara Smith, who has coiffed the hair of many celebrities including the stars of films such as Quentin Tarantino’s Grindhouse and girly favourite Sex and the City, was limited by smaller volumes when she launched her range of organic haircare products this year. Her organic vision extended to the packaging, which was developed by cosmetics and toiletries brand developer Ginger Lily in Nottingham.

The biggest thing is trying to have colour-matched, bespoke packaging without having to order large numbers, says Ginger Lily owner Liz Wilkinson. It would be a wonderful thing if bottle and cap manufacturers would offer this with minimal orders.

The rounded, organic body of the Tara Smith bottle is packed with information and designed to be easy to pack in a suitcase. Smaller bottles that can be carried as hand luggage but contain enough product to last a couple of weeks were also designed. Each component, bottle, label and cap, is made from the same plastic so the entire product can be recycled as one. Finally, hang tags impregnated with wildflower seeds were placed around the bottle necks.

Packaging cuts
Hand-made cosmetics brand Lush takes its green efforts a step further with its aim to eliminate packaging from some of its products. Solid shampoo bars with no packaging are sold alongside standard liquid shampoo in its stores. One bar equates to three 250g bottles of liquid shampoo. Recycled PET bottles are manufactured for the company in Suffolk. Their high recycled content results in a slight blue tint and the loss of a bit of flexibility. Consequently, Lush says it is sometimes necessary to add a touch of virgin material to the mix.

Tubes are another way to distinguish your product. The shampoo is usually in a bottle with the conditioner or styling products in tubes, says Evelyn Tweedie vice president tubes Europe at Arista Tubes in Stevenage. Direct printing provides great graphics. For viscous products all of the contents can be squeezed out of a tube, whereas a significant amount would be left in a bottle. Tubes are mostly made from blends of LLDPE, LDPE or HDPE. Technically they are quite complex to manufacture as the tube is printed in the round so demands skill, explains Tweedie.

Shampoo and conditioner remains the pick’n’mix of the packaging world. You can mix bottles with tottles, tubes with tubs as long as a feeling of family is retained. The vast majority is sold on supermarket shelves, so sugar sweet colours will always be popular in this mature market. Playing with the interaction between bottle and product could be the way forward, for those brands with the volumes and finance to justify it. Fashion, beauty and luxury will continue to be sources of inspiration. After all, You’re worth it.

COLOUR REVOLUTION
Sales of over-the-counter hair colour sets are up 27%, according to a study of 10,000 Asda shoppers. Hair dye packaging and formulation are evolving to make it ever easier and quicker to dye your own hair. Revlon dipped its toe into this market when it asked Mark Crawley to develop his two-part mixing technology. The technology consists of an upper chamber that holds the dye and a second chamber for the hydrogen peroxide. Rotating the base breaks a seal which enables the two liquids to mix without the user touching the dye. The user breaks off a seal on the nozzle to use the dye. Crawley worked with GX Designer Engineers in Wales to develop the technology. Due to economic constraints, the pack never made it to market. However, Crawley has since had interest from Reckitt Benckiser in developing the technology further.

MARKET ANALYSIS
Haircare is one of the few FMCG categories that appears to be resilient in the face of the economic downturn.

Euromonitor International has seen little reduction in consumer purchases of haircare. Affecting the market more dramatically is the fact that the average consumer is becoming more price-savvy and increasingly concerned about household savings. With many brands struggling to maintain customer loyalty, the number of promotional offers on the market has grown substantially. This has posed profit problems, damaged innovation and prevented growth. Rather than attempting to launch new brands, relaunches are becoming popular.

In an increasingly competitive marketplace, manufacturers have found that niche products sell best and innovation has focused on ranges of shampoos and conditioners to suit people with specific hair types and colours. Added benefits, such as extra nutrients, are employed to add value to products in a mature market. With one eye on the ageing consumer, recent launches have included Dove’s Pro-Age and Schwarzkopf’s anti-hair-loss range.

For packaging, shelf differentiation is also coming to the fore. One recent example is the relaunch by P&G of the Herbal Essences range, using highly coloured PET bottles to differentiate between targeted product formulations, promoting a more modern image and allowing consumers to easily identify complementary products.

Packaging innovation in haircare is expected to slow over the next 12-18 months in line with cost-saving efforts and also to avoid perceptions among consumers that a packaging switch translates to an increase in price.

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