give instead of take: a better way to celebrate!
This is the motto of our Heart’s Desires. Our heart does not only beat for design. In 2020, it was our heart’s desire to have a special focus on the social and environmental impact we have as an agency. Until this year, every baries team member received a personal birthday gift. This year, we decided to donate that money instead to a good purpose. Therefore, everyone could individually select a charity of their choice. Less consumption – more happiness!
These are the organizations our team members selected:
Check our Instagram highlights to see the variety of organizations that have been chosen so far by our team members for their birthday donations!
Helau & Alaaf! Celebrating carnival in the Rhineland is a great tradition and provides the opportunity to dress up in funky costumes. Being located in Düsseldorf it is imperative that we dress up and we very much enjoy visiting our customers in a casual way. Of course, as a creative team we love to come up with a new costume every year and to surprise our clients and friends with a new, creative & trendy carnival-kit every year. However, carnival can bring about a lot of waste and is rather environmental-unfriendly. The costumes mostly consist of disposable items and the sweets and treats are wrapped in plastic. How did we solve this conflict?
This year, we have finally created our first sustainable carnival-kit! All treats we have given our customers have been locally manufactured in Düsseldorf and wrapped in paper to avoid plastics. The motto for our self-made costumes out of upcycled materials: Be Kings and Queens of hearts!
In the course of the year, we are giving a few seasonal gifts to our customers and employees, which were under our motto Heart’s desires as well. As part of the mission, the gifts are regionally sourced and intended for a good cause. As an example: the summer gifts were fruity jams handmade by „Paul kocht“ – an initiative that offers work and acceptance to people with special needs. With natural ingredients and exclusive flavors such as ‚Aperol-Orange‘ or ‚Pear and Lime‘, the spreads didn’t only take care of our client’s summer vibes, but also meaningful work. All this of course packed with a self-illustrated baries design.
Now, going towards the end of the year, it is even more important to share some love with people who are important to you during the Advent time. The countdown towards Christmas has officially started and we are so excited to unpack the wonderful presents from our Adventsome calendar together with every team member day by day. Matching our Heart’s Desires motto, the Advent calendar contains
Real sustainability on the next level: Henkel Laundry and Home Care is launching its new brand Love Nature, that is committed to sustainable cleanliness and refillable bottles – and baries design builds the holistic brand design.
Brand building for Henkel‘s new sustainable vegan & eco-friendly cleaning brand
For us as designers, it is a matter of course to strive for sustainable packaging – being as environmentally friendly as possible. Therefore, we were beyond excited to take part in the strategic brand building of Love Nature. We were asked to create a holistic concept for the new brand absolutely from scratch. The products should be green by heart, but still target the mass market. Research revealed that performance and fragrance are crucial product properties for consumers, which should not be compromised by sustainability. Accordingly, it was important to come up with a design strategy that combines eco-friendliness with top performance and great fragrances.
How do you turn ecological cleaners and detergents into an easy choice for everyone? Our holistic design approach started from creating bottle shapes, logo, product labels, icons to pack shots and mood boards.
Firstly, we had to conceptualize how to balance the communication of sustainability and product performance. Consumers still perceive these properties as contradiction and put more emphasis on strong performance as well as fragrance when it comes to laundry and home care. Hence, it has been a crucial design task to convince users: the product can do both!
It has been recommended to use a bright-colored formula in order to transport the products’ high performance and amazing scent. In addition to that, we perfectly chose a label giving the product the needed natural look and feel. The color relates to natural craft paper. Moreover, we decided to give the label a more organic touch by including imperfect fonts and subtle colors.
Of course, the logo clearly reveals the brand identity involving sustainability. The natural green in a light an artistic watercolor style symbolizes the earth and provides a rich contrast to the natural label colors. Additionally, this image is made even more clear in the letter ‘o’ of the word ‘Love’. On top, a butterfly is lifting its wings flying into nature. The emotional element makes you feel good to live consciously and creates a movement. As Henkel’s product manager states:
“They say a butterfly flapping its wings in one part of the world may cause a huge effect somewhere else.”
Moreover, the strong color in contrast to the natural paper highlights the sense of importance, that is put towards our planet.
Another very important aspect whilst considering sustainable packaging design is consumer education. Many people still lack knowledge on the specific eco-friendly properties and seek easy-to-understand information on products. Hence, why we have created a range of icons, which highlight the most important benefits playfully. Next to the standardized CFI cruelty-free and EU Ecolabel, we designed icons to show: The bottles are made of 100% recycled plastic and are again recyclable. Additionally, the ingredients are up to 98,5% from a natural origin. Moreover, the fragrance such as cactus leaves is depicted similarly promoting the important product benefit in an eco-friendly way.
Seasonal limited editions by Schwarzkopf Gliss Kur allow us creative freedom. Therefore, we had a lot of fun creating the limited edition design for Gliss Kur Winter Repair 2020.
Contrary to the baseline range, the design should be more disruptive while reflecting the products winterly benefits. Furthermore, we should consider a few other aspects:
Like in the years before, we were so excited to create the design for this seasonal range. By breaking up the usual brand structure, the Winter Repair edition differentiates more and more from the baseline. Luckily, this development gives us a lot of leeway to build the design.
In 2019, the new Vademecum bio kids design featuring ‚Happy Companions‘ was added to the Vademecum bio toothpaste portfolio.
For the new Vademecum bio kids line we developed the packaging design & illustrated two individual characters to embody the ingredients and taste of the toothpaste. The mint and the strawberry are very cute and illustrated with bright and happy colors. The friendly design and characters will help to make brushing teeth a fun thing to do for children.
In order to highlight that the toothpaste is completely organic, a natural pastel color tone and recycled paper structure were used for the basis of the pack. Furthermore, the „Bio“ -seal was placed in a prominent and freestanding position, to make it clearly visible to the customer.
We used a simple and easily understandable color coding, which harmonizes with the color of the illustration, to differentiate the two sorts and to highlight the user age recommendations.
Vademecum Bio Kids on the web
In 2020 Gliss Kur by Schwarzkopf got a holistic relaunch, so it starts this new decade with a complete modernized look. With this relaunch we are not only celebrating a new brand- and packaging design but also more than 10 years of collaboration between Gliss Kur and baries design.
Gliss Kur has always been the hair expert among the hair care brands. Nowadays, it is more than that: It is a lifestyle product, that offers solutions to all hair issues. Accordingly, the technological brand perception shifted to a more lifestyle oriented natural and sporty look.
With this relaunch we were able to create the next milestone within the brand design history.
To transform the strong technological brand impression to a more natural and sporty approach, we finally released the visual out of its box. That means, that we excluded the technological visual from a text box and gave it its own space to stand out.
This transition already started in the last year with the designs for the new Gliss Kur product lines Bio-Tech Restore and Nutri-Balance Repair within the pre-relaunch portfolio. Both sorts already set the focus on a combination of technological performance and the power of nature.
Schwarzkopf successfully introduced our new design language to the market. So, our pre-relaunch approach was continued for the actual relaunch. The outstanding way of presenting the power of nature in technology to the whole portfolio was a natural consequence.
According to the new brand strategy, the key visuals on the bottles have been shifted outside the text box. They partially show natural ingredients of which the style has been inspired by X-ray machine pictures. Most importantly, all of these natural elements are embedded in amorphous liquids, that give a microbiological impression – perfectly combining nature with technology. In summary, the unboxing and modern organic shapes create a new emotionality and natural touch.
However, Schwarzkopf Gliss Kur stays the expert in hair technology and needs to maintain the strong communication of its benefits. To follow up, the square from the previous design is now used as text background. This allows the recognition of the brand for former customers. Additionally, it does ensure the proper readability and clear structure of the text.
Thanks to design structure and new bottle shape, Gliss Kur gained a cleaner look and a reduced appearance. Besides, it is also relieving that stickers on the bottle fronts are now history – thanks to Henkel‘s sustainability strategy.
The new Gliss Kur bottles for shampoo and conditioner are probably the main driver for the new brand elegance. They are inspired by the bottle shapes of the more elegant Chinese Gliss Kur sister brand “Extra Care“.
We kept the characteristic shoulders for the new shape. But, the new contour interprets them softer and therefore with more modernity and elegance. The shoulders and the new cap do now merge perfectly together. This innovation creates a single soft outline that fits the new natural influence. Moreover, the flat cap and high shoulders let the bottle appear a little taller than before. The bottle-to-cap ratio is certainly strengthening the bottle and shelf impact. Through this emerging shape with the slimmed waist, a female touch is added and the elegance stressed even further.
Furthermore, we created an increased consistency with a uniform black cap throughout the whole range. This empowers the brand block appearance on shelf. At second glance, another fine detail get‘s revealed: The Schwarzkopf logo icon is embossed in the cap‘s top and finishes the new elegance.
In consequence of the new brand identity, the logo got a modern facelift.
Gliss Kur has been one of our first brands and continued the long term collaboration for over ten years. As a result, this brought us to this 2020 design, which is an exceptional step in terms of modernity and brand perception. Once again we are not only celebrating a new milestone in the history of Gliss, but also in that of baries! It is part of what makes us to experts – not only for the design but also brand strategy.
In conclusion, it is worth mentioning that we from baries design not only redesigned the packaging, but also shaped the visual impact of the brand identity. From now on, the communication style of Schwarzkopf Gliss Kur is modern and purely minimalist. Accents will be highlighted with bold bars. While white became the main color of the brand, black changed from a background color to an accent color.
Schwarzkopf Gliss Kur on the web