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.