What should a sustainable cleaning brand look like?

A great design is enough to pull customers and help you stand out. We wanted to create a bottle you don’t have to hide. Here's a little piece on our journey of creating a cleaning kit that reflects what we stand for! Do read. Hope to hear your thoughts in the comments below. 

As we sat around the conference table we had a number of ideas in our heads. 

We wanted to create a cleaner for our home that you don’t have to hide. 

Something you’d happily show off on your Instagram and inspire more to adopt a more sustainable lifestyle like you. 

Something that breaks the category, visually. 

We’re so used to seeing blue-red industrial-looking bottles of cleaners, that very often you don’t even read the name before picking out a bottle. 

We wanted to change that. 

Early on, we also knew that we wanted to keep it minimal and chic. After all, we were creating a lifestyle, and every one of our customers deserves to feel special. 

We dived straight into design mode, drawing inspiration from fashion, luxury and lifestyle brands. 

Here are a few of the early designs that we dabbled with: 

It’s only when we started putting things to paper that a clear theme started to emerge. 

We needed our bottles to speak for themselves and cue in the causes we stand for. 

Saving water bodies and aquatic life is at the core of The Better Home, and our packaging just had to communicate that. 

Here’s the design we all loved: 

With marine animals in the front and content to support saving our oceans, we were set to launch. 

This wasn’t as seamless a process as it sounds, though. 

Since we were aiming to launch an FMCG brand at a smaller scale, there were a number of challenges with the shape and material of the bottles. We looked at various options for the packaging materials, and realised that glass or metal wasn’t the best choice - given their high ecological footprint and reaction to contents. 

After wrecking our heads for a few days, we decided that we wanted our packaging to be more than just a bottle you get the contents in - we wanted it to be a lifestyle that revolves around reduce, reuse and recycle. Which is why, we encourage our customers to subscribe to the cleaners so they get to reuse the bottles. 

Refill pouches are sent to them after the first month. The discarded packaging can be shipped back to us for our take-back program. 

Keeping consistency in mind, we also designed the secondary packaging out of cardboard, which would also be used as our shipping box. Every box comes with a tiny fragrance card that you can hang up in your bathrooms, you can DIY this box to death into a million other things, suggestions provided by us.

Pretty happy with our creation, we launched in February 2020. 

Very often, brands end up forgetting that user experience is the first and most important for everyday products. The fact that our bottles looked very similar to each other left a lot of consumers feeling confused between each one of them. Also the fact that in India, it's mostly the domestic helpers who used the cleaners, made it more difficult for them to pick the right one if they couldn't read and had to distinguish from visual clues.

In a deja vu situation, once again we were sitting around our conference room thinking about how to make it easier for the end consumer to distinguish between all our bottles. A few design tweaks later, we colour-coded every bottle and added icons for dish, toilet, laundry and floor. 

We also decided to change the packaging message to reward our customers for making the right choice. 

Here’s what it reads now: 

"Hey you. 

Yes, you.

Holding this bottle, wondering what to do next.

For starters, you must pat yourself on the back. 

By making the responsible choice, you've: 

- Rid your home of toxic chemicals and fumes.

- Kept toxic wastewater from entering our water bodies.

- Bought home cleaners that are safe for you, your loved ones and our oceans.

How good does that sound? Almost as good as it cleans.

You are a part of the movement to make the planet better, one home at a times. It's time to be a messenger of all that's better." 

And then you get an option of sharing this on Whatsapp after scanning a QR code.

While we’ve been getting a lot of love across social media, we’re still looking for ways to evolve. 

How is it that we can make an unboxing experience which you’d love to tell your friends about? 

How can we do better every day, and create something that not just speaks to our values but also to the values of our customers?

I believe that it’s a never-ending journey of discovery, and The Better Home isn’t quite the one to shy away from change. Our revamped design was launched only a month after we discovered the gap. 

It’s all about listening to your customers and acting quick, I think. It’s also about adding a little splash of colour here and there. 

You can check out The Better Home at: https://bit.ly/3iNUuxV