Today’s Best Beauty Packaging is Digital and Natural

Cosmetics, personal care, and fragrance packaging is changing in response to the realities of ecommerce and the green, clean beauty movement.

For this year’s ADF&PCD packaging tradeshow in New York City, I was invited to develop and moderate a panel discussion among beauty and fragrance packaging pros.

And those two market trends—the digital and the natural—put our whole conversation in context.

I invited Jodi Katz, the Founder & Creative Director of Base Beauty; Fran?ois Damide, Founder & President of Crafting Beauty; and Laszlo Moharita, Global Director of J&J Beauty Packaging, to join me on the panel and share case studies of how they each met challenges and overcame obstacles to create truly innovative beauty packaging.

Industry Leaders

If you’ve clicked on my articles here LinkedIn before, you already know that I work for CosmeticsDesign.com. Topics I report on for the beauty business news site range from brand innovations and consumer trends to new ingredients and emerging science as well as mergers & acquisitions, finance, and of course, I cover packaging.

Now, the majority of my articles are about multinational corporations, big beauty companies like J&J, like L’Oréal, Estée Lauder and equally prominent ingredient or packaging suppliers.

Indie Trailblazers 

But, over the past years my coverage has increasingly focused on beauty and fragrance startups, what we now commonly call indie beauty. In fact, every Monday on the site I run a column called the Indie Beauty Profile.

It’s easy to assume these smaller players are, well, small in the multibillion dollar beauty business. But everyone, and I mean everyone in the industry has their eye on indie these days. This summer, for instance, I took a quick trip out to Parsippany, New Jersey, where I sat down with Parand Salmassina.

Parand is the Vice President of DSM personal care in North America. From her perspective in the beauty ingredient space, Parand affirmed that “indie beauty is shaping the future of this industry.”

Which is why the panelists who spoke with me that day at the ADF&PCD event came from both big corporations and firms that serve brands regardless of size.

Trends That Matter

It’s interesting to consider the current prevailing influences on beauty packaging innovation, which I would say comprise the digital, the environmental, and the portable.

Portion control is why we see increasingly accurate dispensers, measuring out product. Its why we see single use packs that make sense for consumers taking beauty products with them on the go. Portion control is why sample sizes products are getting more and more stylish, mimicking full sized products in shape and application technique, and it’s why the luxury indie soap brand Senteurs D’Orient is making single use bar soaps.

Digital packaging. Most brands owned by legacy beauty companies developed packaging for the retail shelf, or even if it’s one of their newer brands they developed packaging for the consumer to use in the privacy of her home. The digital age has changed both the way packaging is viewed and how it is used.

That same consumer today, is likely replenishing her go-to products online and sharing notes and videos about her favorites on social media.  

So, the beauty packaging she encounters must perform as well in an online animation as it does in hand. And brands have to keep their tangible labeling up to date with the digital counterpart; any information delay or inconsistent imagery gives rise to instant consumer doubt.

Ship-ability. Primary, secondary, and now even tertiary packaging that is readily shippable as a single product or alongside items from completely different sectors is now as import as the in-store retail experience. We see this perhaps most obviously with unboxing, the digital videos where people are opening shipments of beauty products: these moments now have to deliver a sense of discovery, an air of the brand’s ethos (be it sophistication, playfulness, etc.), and they must—I should hope—deliver the product intact and with at least as much service support as an off-the-shelf product has.

Sustainability. The same day as our panel discussion, I wrote on CosmeticsDesign.com about my first impressions of the ADF&PCD show, and nearly every packaging company I’d spoken with for the piece mentioned that sustainability is a concern for their clients.

Now, a lot falls into this space when it comes to beauty packaging. Things like material sourcing, recyclability, and waste, as well as the option of packaging refills, like we see from the innovative deodorant brand Switch Fresh. (Though I will admit refillable packaging brings up all kinds of concerns about contamination, preservation, etc.)

But, sustainability so far as the consumer is concerned crosses over in to the space of natural ingredients and natural formulations. While it matters if packaging is sustainably sourced and manufactured, and recyclable or reusable, it can be just as impactful for packaging to simply be naturally Inspired.

Wooden lids signify in this context and have become quite popular because they’re both aesthetically pleasing and a made of a natural material.  The indie skin care brand Olio de Alessando is hoping the same holds true for marble bottle toppers.

And in this way also, naturally inspired fragrances, formulas, and colors resonate with today’s beauty consumer. At last month’s Indie Beauty Expo here in NYC, I checked in with the nail color brand Flora 1761. Every nail polish color that brand launches is inspired by a real flower color, like the Flanders Poppy, the Star Magnolia, Lilly of the Valley etc. (despite the fact that nail polish can’t be natural).

Natural imagery, natural packaging materials, and the right labeling language work very well in today’s marketplace where sustainability matters to shoppers.

Innovation is Really Just Creativity

Solving beauty packaging challenges is not only about knowing the trends that matter but also about how best to develop or select cosmetics, personal care, and fragrance packaging that wins all along the supply chain.

Which means that packaging innovation can’t be only about packaging as an object or as a mechanism; it must also be about how, when, where, and why packaging happens.

Packaging innovation is any new or novel way to solve for a challenge that brands, companies, product formulators, manufacturers, distributors, retailers, or consumers face. And, creativity and expert wisdom are crucial when it comes to getting the right packaging for the right product in today’s highly competitive beauty marketplace.

Innovation today can be anything from a strategy to accelerate speed to market, to a way to sidestep the minimum quantitates that many fillers and packagers still impose, to developing the creative angle that will entice consumers to try—and then to rebuy—from a brand in a marketplace full of dazzling alternatives.