Personality is part of what a package carries.

One of the essential roles of package design is to convey brand personality, at the very moment a customer comes into contact with it. The package is there to, not only hold, but represent the product inside, and attract the browser with a proper dose of the personality contained within the brand. This role becomes more important as the category reaches maturity.

For instance, in vodka, the standard bottle shapes had all been used, copied, refined and copied again for as long as the potato has been in existence. In order for Double Cross vodka, a new entrant in the early 2000s, to be successful, the team needed to convey a spirit of distinct personality throughout their package design. Concepts, dripping with personality, ranged from bottles that created an optical illusion to one with two chambers, double crossing the individual trying to pour.

Beware of the spinning bottle.

The vodka category was nearing maturity, so the team needed to push the product experience past a standard form, to find a place on bar shelves. The Double Cross vodka brand was highly successful as the first rectangular bottle, won a litany of awards and even made some guest appearances on television shows.

The vodka inside may be the product, but in reality, the product experience (enabled by the bottle) is where the brand displays its most distinctive value to the consumer. Think about it, everyone has “their” mug at the office, and even the best coffee (product) wouldn’t taste quite the same if you weren’t sipping it out of a coffee mug that says “Don’t talk to me before this is empty” (product experience).

Our Hydro Flask client is exceptionally adept at pushing brand personality into their product experience, and then, letting the package support their effusive attitude. Meaning, the packaging was built to support the brand personality in the product experience above all else, while still providing a functional design. The band around the package was there to be more than just a place to stick a barcode, it needed to help transform a rational decision into an emotional one.

While the space limitations of a simple packaging band might seem to reduce its importance, it demands an ability to effectively edit the visual and written language into its most potent form. And, much like how our friends at Double Cross are skilled at distilling a certain spirit into its most potent form, Hydro Flask clearly understands the importance of studying consumer behavior at the moment of purchase in order to remove any invisible points of friction and display the most distilled, yet effective message.

The resulting packaging is messaged and designed to be more tempting for the shopper looking to go deeper in their potential flask purchase.