Looking Fit 03/2004: Thinking Inside & Outside: Today’s Packaging Styles Are Better Than Ever

Thinking Inside & Outside
Today’s Packaging Styles Are Better Than Ever

by Matt Morgan

“YOU’RE ULTIMATELY SELLING THE LOTION INSIDE, but the first sell is the package,” says Carin M. Castelnuovo-Tedesco, vice president of creative services for California Tan, Inc.

“The package has to first attract customers’ attention, encourage them to pick it up, then intrigue them so they’re walking the product to the cash register to purchase it.”

Packaging for tanning lotions is just like any field requiring the attraction of buyers, says Sunny Stinchcombe, director of marketing at Supre, Inc. “You need something that is going to call them to your products,” she says. “It just happens that in tanning salons, because of the nature of our business, generally there’s a lot more going on in packaging than, say, a department-store shelf. You really have to stand out and have an attractive eye appeal to draw the customer to the product.”

Even in a salon that is exclusive to just one brand, products in that brand compete against each other on the shelf, says Yana Simone, director of marketing for Fiji Blend, Inc.

“First and foremost, does the package stand out on the shelf?” she asks. “What’s unique and different about it? If you look on a shelf and you see a whole bunch of different bottles or boxes, what catches your eye? What stands out?”

Hint: It’s the packaging.

This is a tough pill to swallow for manufacturers striving to develop the most effective lotion formulas possible. But they can take comfort in the fact that if an attractively packaged lotion doesn’t deliver results, sales will undoubtedly go south.

Ah, but are tanners going to buy the lotion without the pretty package?

“Unfortunately—and I say the word unfortunately—packaging has taken total control of the tanning industry,” says Stacy Kaufman, president of Performance Brands, Inc., maker of Fiesta Sun and Pro Tan. “People are drawn by what looks good, and what looks good has to be the packaging. The packaging is really the most critical element to get that first look.”

Fiji Blend considers itself committed to innovation, and that stretches to packaging. “We want to be able to stand out on the shelves, we want to look good, and we want to provide something that consumers want to check out,” Simone says. “In turn it gives salon owners an opportunity to make more money retail-wise, because now they’re carrying interesting products.”

Indoor tanning’s products are interesting, all right, and they keep getting better. Last year, Fiji Blend captured the attention of one of the nation’s most prestigious packaging publications, Packaging World, for its far-from-ordinary bottles. The 10.1-ounce tottles— bottles that set on their caps—contain a unique color-shifting technology that, along with the larger size, make them stand out.

Performance Brands has won international design awards for its bottles, Kaufman says.

“Everything is designed to get consumers to pick up the lotion,” he says. “When they pick it up, they look at the bottle, they look for a price, and they open it up and smell it. If all of those components work, then they try it. And if they try it and they like it, they tell their friends. If they try it and they don’t like it, they use the whole bottle and they buy something different.”

Like most ideas generated by manufacturers, the packaging process begins at the salon level.

“Input comes from everyday training—traveling to different salons, talking to people,”

Kaufman says. “Every weekend we travel to all of these distributor trade shows, and we see literally hundreds of salon owners. It’s there that you really find what works and doesn’t work. You listen to them and you read between the lines as to what they would like to have.

You compile that information in your mind. In our case, a group of us sits down—men and women, young and old—and we think of concepts that have some merit and hopefully will be the next best product.”

In addition to exploring traditional research avenues, ETS, Inc., keeps in mind the predominantly female audience, says John Keiffner, the company’s executive director of business development. The company can make a packaging idea a reality in as little as 90 days or take up to 18 months.

Finding a package at Supre could take two weeks or four months, Stinchcombe says.

“We’re constantly collecting and exploring packaging solutions,” Castelnuovo-Tedesco says. “Because at Cal Tan, we might develop a product concept and package for years, or we might react really quickly to a growing trend.”

Trends are identified from outside the tanning industry as well as inside.

“Packaging inspiration comes from our everyday experiences, whether it’s from architecture or landscape or industrial design,” she continues. “We’re picking up colorscheme ideas and shapes and materials from everything that we see and do, inside and outside of work. We’re also inspired by other industries, like the wine industry, for example. You go into a wine shop and the use of color and overall shape and material is something that can be very surprising.”

The concept behind Fiesta Sun’s Tan Tini Collection, for example, began at the bar. “We came up with a theme utilizing martinis, which happen to be very popular,” Kaufman says. “We backed it up with having a bottle custom-designed to look like a shaker, and we spared no expense in having a cap that looks like it’s chrome.”

Fiji Blend also looks outside the industry to bring fresh ideas to indoor tanning. “You’re never going to expand something if you’re constantly looking within it,” Simone explains. “You’ve got to look outside the box, so to speak. It’s not necessarily about fitting into a certain category, but it’s more like creating a new category.”

For example, at a packaging show last year, the company discovered the process behind the lenticular, holographic box that became the foundation for its Tantric package.

Bottles are the foundation for effective lotion packaging. If they lack pizzazz, they’ll get passed over by consumers. If they are purchased but turn out to be awkward to handle, they won’t be bought again. Quality containers need to be an equal blend of memorable color, size and shape.

Tanners tend to equate lotions to the bottles that contain them, Castelnuovo-Tedesco says.

“Bold colors—or at least accents of colors—often capture the interest of the tanning customers,” she says. “Psychologically, it translates into a strong, powerful result, which is what they’re looking for.

Keiffner refers to a bottle’s “handability”—how a bottle feels when it’s held by tanners. “You have to keep in mind that we’re in a 75-percent female market, so you want things that are attractive to females.”

Because of the nature of tanning lotions, packages should be designed for tanners to squeeze out as much formula as possible.

Pliable bottles are key, he says, as is a good dispensing device: mainly, the cap.

For all new package developments, Supre starts with stock bottles. “Obviously it’s the path of least resistance,” Stinchcombe says. “It’s the easiest thing for us to utilize.”

If no stock bottles fit the product’s image, then the company looks to new molds. “For example, with Smoke and Tattoo, we used custom-mold bottles because we couldn’t find anything that really felt like what we wanted for the brand.” Supre owns the mold for the sleek, smooth and slanted Smoke bottle as well as the tall, attention-grabbing Tattoo container.

California Tan, Inc. spent more than $150,000 on a new custom shape, designed in-house and named Topaz after its birthstone, Castelnuovo-Tedesco says. The bottle can be seen in many products, including Helix and MaxLotion.

For its new Shift product, Supre went away from bottles altogether. The unique pouch package design and the formula it holds are intended to change the way tanners think of their lotions.

“We wanted to make a thicker, more buttery formula, so we needed to have something that was going to be able to dispense all of the product,” Stinchcombe says. “We saw this packaging in other industries and in Europe. It really fit with the whole feel of the Shift name, and it worked awesome with the product thickness. It’s a very sturdy package, and people love to feel it.”

Each new lotion concept comes with a development budget. Special packaging such as custom molds leads to higher packaging costs, which in turn drives up retail prices. If packaging costs exceed what is budgeted and the price is already set, however, the result is an affordable yet underpriced product.

“There are some times when your packaging might exceed what you’re willing to charge somebody, so you just work on less margin,” Kaufman says. That situation could be acceptable if the product is perceived by consumers to be a good value and sales don’t suffer too much.

Usually, costs depend on the price-point and return on investment of the brand, Stinchcombe says.

“Cost will come into play a lot more in a budget line than it will in a high-end line,” she says. “That’s simply because on a high-end line the expenditure is well worth it to get the package.” Smoke is a great example. “Yes, it was pricey to put it together and to have the mold made and even to run the bottle.

But was it worth it for that brand? Absolutely.”

Manufacturers try to strike a balance between economy and innovation.

“We’re not here to lose money, we’re here to make money,”

Simone says. “But at the same time, we are not so focused on cost being the deciding factor, because innovation is very important to us. Having said that, so is cost. We definitely work out where we don’t have to sacrifice innovation for cost.”

The design comes first at California Tan. “The best design solution is the most important aspect of deciding on a package design,” Castelnuovo-Tedesco says. “The cost factor is really secondary. It’s my job to develop the best package, and the numbers are something we have to figure out afterward.”

When the development process is complete, the lotion takes on its own personality. Each name and marketing theme make one lotion unique among all others, and packaging is an important part of the equation.

“It’s all very much connected,” Stinchcombe says.

“Everything that is selected is selected due to every other element so it all works together to create the right name for the right look for the right package.”

The right package has to connect with the right tanner, too, which is why salon owners need to know who’s coming into their businesses.

“There’s got to be something about the package—the color of it, the shape of it, the name of the product—that makes sense to the consumer,” Kaufman says. “Each of those important factors is what separates one product from another.”

At Performance Brands, product personality starts with the name and continues with the package. “When we say personality, it’s actually the person’s personality,” he says. “For instance, if you think you’re a little too twisted, you’re going to pick up 2 Twisted. If you’re feeling kind of purple and you like this Purple Daze, you’re going to pick it up. You have to transpose that into a bottle of lotion.”

Product personality is one of the reasons for the increase in innovative packaging, Castelnuovo-Tedesco says. “If lotions didn’t have personalities, you would just see those classic type solutions printed in just two colors across every single product,” she says. “In order to put every single personality in the spotlight, you have to explore all of the packaging possibilities.”

Many manufacturers are taking the characteristics of individual lotions and applying them to collections, she says.

“When we start developing our products, they become like entities, like creations,” Simone says. “They have their own personalities—they have their own fragrance, their own feel, their own demographic that they tie into. As they start being developed, and as we find packaging for the individual products and locate ingredients, they get lives of their own.”

With new formulations and package design features developed every year, it can be difficult for existing lotions to keep up. Yet each manufacturer has that lotion or two that continue to generate solid sales. A tweak here or there could boost an old lotion’s life a bit more or send it into obscurity. Manufacturers agree that they struggle with whether to reintroduce old, faithful lotions to the market.

Supre threw caution to the wind and revamped several of its tried-and-true SKUs: Rayz, Extreme and Jam.

“Those are very mature products for us, and their packaging was great 13, 14 and 15 years ago, but really times have changed,” Stinchcombe explains. “You have to look at updating the look or you have to look at discontinuing them.”

The entire Rayz package was reworked, save the name, formula and fragrance. New packaging uncovered a new market for an old product, she says. Extreme received a modernization while keeping much of its look, including its trademark tube. Jam went to an oval tube, kept the logo look but put it on a different background.

It is possible to reduce the amount of guesswork by researching the market and figuring out the needs of the target demographic. In some cases a manufacturer may have a bottle that the staff loves but doesn’t translate well to the salon shelves.

“If you do your homework—and we’ve done intense focusgroup studies—you pretty much eliminate as much of the risk as possible,” Keiffner says.

Kaufman constantly struggles with repackaging issues, he says.

“The benefit of repackaging a lotion that’s three or four years old is that people will continue to buy it for years to come,” he says. “The risk is that people won’t recognize it. It’s a tough call.

As the owner of this company, I fight with that all the time— about keeping something old and keeping something new.”

Package redesign paid dividends for California Tan, Inc. and its Emerald Bay brand. Last year, the company put full-color shrink sleeves on the original bottle shape, and the result was a dramatic increase in sales, Castelnuovo-Tedesco says.

That’s the ultimate goal for lotion packaging: produce an eyecatching product that makes money for everyone. The byproducts are ever-improving styles and cool trends.

“While at the same time nothing is truly new—it’s been reinvented from something in the past—people are always interested in change,” she continues. “It is something that becomes very attractive to them.”