After acquiring a chain of salons in the Midwest that had been founded by hairstylist Mario Tricoci, Elizabeth Arden Spas reformulated Tricoci’s hair care line with natural ingredients and then wanted to rebrand it for a national launch.

What's in a name?
The initial name for the hair care line, Portrait, was established when Elizabeth Arden asked Alexander Isley (www.alexanderisley.com)—a design consultancy based in Cincinnati—to work on packaging for the line. The first thing Isley did was suggest a name change. It was a bold move for sure, but one motivated by a strong conviction. Isley was convinced the name wouldn’t appeal to the 30- to 45-year-olds Arden had in mind as target customers. Since the line is meant to be combined by consumers to match their hair types, the new name became obvious: Match.

“We really felt that the name Portrait was not going to speak to young women in their 30s,” says Aline Hilford, managing partner. “Portrait was more conservative, older, historic and dusty. That was the first time we had that happen, where we actually were brought in when the name was already developed.

Alexander Isley, creative director, quickly adds that a brand’s name is important, but ultimately it’s what you do with it that counts. He says, “It’s more than just a name. At a certain point, it’s what you do with it in terms of the packaging, marketing and public persona. When people think of Nike, they maybe think of the swoosh. They think of the shoes; they think of Phil Knight. They really don’t think of the Greek goddess. Magical things happen when you put $220 million a year behind marketing something.”

(above) Before starting on any creative work for the Match brand launch, design consultancy Alexander Isley did its own research on the target audience. Creative director Alexander Isley says, “Part of our digging was to do some presentation boards of who this woman is: ‘What’s she like?’ and ‘What does she do?’ It helped show our understanding and gave us weight when it came to making our recommendations, not only in terms of the name, but visually.” Aline Hilford, managing partner, says that Isley had the luxury of forming a creative team that was ideally suited for the project. “It helped on our end that three of the five people working on the Match line fell within the target [market] and sort of knew the mind-set of this woman that they were going after.”

Modern characters
Even though Elizabeth Arden wouldn’t be putting that kind of money behind its new hair care line, the company agreed that Match was a better fit. With the new name in place, Isley then got down to business. First, the firm experimented with a font or logo treatment for the brand. After trying several different font iterations, Isley settled on Venus. Ironically enough, it’s a typeface from the early 1900s.

“The letters have character to them, and we felt that got back to what we were trying to do with the overall packaging, where it’s very clean and simple, but graphic,” Isley says. “When you look closely, you see this interesting pattern, and the letters have a little bit of quirkiness to them. I guess it is ironic that [we used] a very old typeface, but we wanted something simple. And we wanted people to see it and not think twice about it.”

(above) The type design had to convey specific brand attributes to the intended audience for Match, including: simplicity, freshness and modernity. Designers tried several sans serif fonts, but ultimately landed with Venus, a typeface from the early 1900s.

Unique complexion
After the logo treatment was chosen, Hilford says the packaging design came down to a choice between two approaches. “One approach was having the difference be the color or having four different colors to work from based on one [overall] pattern,” Hilford says. “The other option was one color with a few different patterns, and in the end, that’s what we ended up going with.”

Isley says the design team considered Pantone colors initially, but ultimately decided on a customized pearlescent blue. “Sometimes the Pantone colors are limiting, and there was an effect we were looking for. We wanted to specify something that would be a signature color,” Isley says.

Although the Match line is not organic, the ingredients are based on natural elements of waterbased products. That led designers to look for inspiration in natural elements such as botanical imagery, herbs, grasses and even tea leaves.

About the author
Rodney J. Moore, a freelance journalist turned communications and PR strategist whose specialty is crafting and making media pitches for companies and individuals, is the founder of Moore Creative Communications. He is the author of Design Secrets: Layout, and he is working on his second nonfiction book.

Read the full article in the December 2007 issue of Dynamic Graphics magazine

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