Exotic

Dayna Decker is probably best known for her wood wick candles. Her collections of home fragrance products are in high-end retail shops around the world. You can check out Daynadecker.com if you would like to know more.

This past spring and summer, I designed a variety of product packaging/branding and re-branding for Dayna. The products are in the same category as Agraria, shown on this blog, but the brand is very different as you can see. Dayna's brand style is more modern, clean, and restrained.

I designed the Exotic collection packaging featuring a matte black stock with high-gloss silhouetted floral photography to compliment the previous collections and celebrate the rich and moodier fragrances.

Branding Bath

Back in 2009, I had redesigned and overhauled Agraria San Francisco's bath line. They had various products in this category but each item seemed like an "add-on" with the logo slapped on as the cohesive branding. I'm the first to support proper exploitation of a brands logo, however the idea of "branding" is so much more. It's a point of view, an approach, a delicate infusion of shape, color, proportion to form identity.

The existing bottle (shown here, inset) was/is a nice squared shape. This bottle is the same bottle that Apothia uses in their bath line (shown). Apothia's bottle looks much better because there branding works well with the shape. The better quality cap helps a lot too. For Agraria, it's "ok" but not a perfect fit with its more classical personality. For a company with a traditional luxury position this was not good enough.

In redesigning Agraria's overall branding, I had focused on the concept of 8 core fragrances. This idea took the form of an octagon repeated in various forms... as a label shape or an element in a pattern. For the bath line, the octagon manifested as a tall bottle shape, short bottle and hand soap bar with slightly different yet cohesive forms.