Last year, BBCA was tasked with redesigning the brand identity and packaging, as well as creating inclusive messaging for Soapwalla, a loved clean skincare brand celebrating its 10th anniversary. Soapwalla’s mission beyond healthy skin is to break down gender norms — in the redesign we declare that Soapwalla is “for all humans.”
We begin a redesign project by answering a few main questions. How far from the current look does the client want to go? Will it be a design evolution, where some design elements remain similar (and recognizable to the loyal consumer), but perhaps a bit more refined? Or will it be a design revolution where the design possibilities are endless?
As the marketplace has changed so much over the past decade, we decided with Rachel, the brand’s founder, that the packaging no longer needed to visually shout from the rooftops that the products were natural. The naturals category has become mainstream, allowing us to lose some of those visual cues. And so we moved ahead with a design revolution. The packaging’s information architecture was also a big design challenge; there were many different colored packages in the line up but they didn’t denote categories. We aimed to establish a color identity system for product categories as well as for scents.
When working with founder brands, we ask clients to share references of packaging they gravitate towards so we can maintain their aesthetic. Rachel favored crisp, clean packaging with simple branding and color blocking. We wove those themes into all of our designs.
Ultimately, we landed as far from the original than we could have imagined, but not without keeping some nods to the original design.
- We took the royal blue of the Soapwalla logo and softened it a bit to a deep periwinkle, and established that firmly as the brand color.
- The new logo is now text-based and prominent — and the leafy vines live on as a simple sprig on the icon.
- The cartons are crisp, bright white and each features a color stripe at the bottom and a matching panel at the top to denote its category (face, body, soap, for all over).
- The copy is stripped down and the modern, open font is super legible.
- The blue panel on the left side of each carton reinforces the brand color.
Rachel has been thrilled with the results, and so are we. “I spent the better part of a year working closely with the BBCA team, rebranding Soapwalla. It’s particularly tricky to go about reimagining a brand that’s been around for a decade and that already has strong messaging. It was truly a joy working with the BBCA team to reinvigorate our aesthetic and logo for the new decade. I really cannot thank the Base Beauty team enough for such a pleasant, mutually respectful, and fun experience. Believe me when I say that’s truly a magical feat!”