Musee Bath Bombs

Design: Process AG
Project Type: Both Concept and Production
Location: Salt Lake City, USA
Packaging Substrate / Materials: Paper, cardboard

Problem:
Luxury packaging plays a unique role in retail in a number of ways. Most people assume packaging is just good for…. well packaging. A method of protection for the product before it is bought by a consumer. At its core, that is accurate of packaging benefit, but as markets have become more competitive and global, companies have been forced to think about packaging in creative and strategic ways to compete for the fleeting attention spans of consumers in highly connected accessible market.

Musee’s is a company that makes bath bomb products that all are fairly inexpensive. Being that the price point is so low it wouldn’t be sustainable to implement overly elegant packaging solutions across all of the SKUs. That doesn’t mean that a brand can’t rule out of the option of using elegant packaging in certain instances that could prove vital for the brands competitive positioning. In the case of Musee, this meant staying away from their traditional form of packaging for their West Elm Collaboration and influencers boxes.

• Create elegant packaging for bath bombs specifically tailored to the retailer West Elm.
• Create an unboxing experience for Musee influencers.
• Demographic: Women age range 20-35 years old willing to pay for premium products associated with a brand name, and influencers that share products with followings.

Process’s approach
Being that most of Musee’s bath bomb products are under the price point of $25 dollars it is really hard to implement elegant packaging. This is due to the fact that packaging can vastly affect product sales margins since the packaging cuts drastically into the COGS. Typically elegant packaging is only seen in high ticket items, but when smaller tickets item have elegant packaging it is a powerful physiological play and can even justify a higher price point. In the case of Musee’s bath bomb products, the implementation of elegant packaging solidified there positioning in a retailer.

Earlier iterations of the bath balm packaging consisted of gift grade colored tissue paper paired with a paper tag with the brands logo and messaging. This simply wouldn’t cut it for the bath bombs that we supposed to debut in West Elm. We choose to implement the use of a partial telescoping uncoated paper tube for their Water Street line. The lid of the tube was left white and covers nearly all of the base. The product name and description are foil-stamped in gold on the front of the lid. The back of the lid reiterates the product name and ingredients used in the specific bath balm. The very top portion of the lid is color to coordinate with the model of bath bomb within. The top of the lid the water street logo stamped in with gold foil again. The base of the tube matches the top of the lid in color and interacts with the lid tightly which creates a vacuum effect that forces a slower removal of the lid and adds a level of intimacy with the elegant packaging.

The second goal of the packaging project was to create an influencer kit that boasted a superior unboxing. The idea was to create an unboxing experience that is so good that the packaging and product alone would warrant being shared without any further monetary incentivization.

For the influencer box, we used a very luxurious large rigid book box to fit a variety of Musee products that influencer could interact with and share. The top of the box has a very large gold Musee logo stamped into the top of the box. This way the logo could be recognized even in a picture or a video. The box itself implements to magnetic clasps for added security and bow as a final embellishment on the elegant packaging.

The inside of the bath bomb box has a graphic with a logo that says “bathe the world in gold”.