Designing for What Came Next
PACKAGING
I came in just as the first round of new packaging for InstaNatural, an Orlando-based skincare brand built largely on Amazon, was being wrapped up. The goal was to move the line toward something more recognizable and a little more elevated, with the green bird of paradise becoming the first big step in that direction. Once that initial design landed, though, we realized pretty quickly that the product line was growing faster than the system had been built for. That became my part of the project. I cleaned up and optimized the original design, then started figuring out how to stretch it across an expanding lineup without losing what made the new packaging feel cohesive in the first place.
Instanatural
PACKAGING
May 15, 2016
3 Years
Bird of Paradise
The second version of the bird of paradise came as we kept simplifying the packaging system. By this point, we had stripped away a lot of the front-facing information, especially on the boxes, and were trying to let the brand do more with less. The goal was to keep only what actually needed to be there and give the illustration, typography, and product itself a little more room to breathe.
Complete Organics
This was around the point where the packaging started to teach us a lot about the brand itself. Once InstaNatural moved beyond Amazon and into physical retail, we discovered a very practical problem: store price channels were literally covering some of the information on the front of the box. With Complete Organics, we started responding to that reality by shifting important information higher up and designing the packaging around how it was actually going to live on a shelf, not just how it looked on a screen.
Packaging Management
The biggest lesson I took from my time at InstaNatural was that, during a rebrand with an outside agency, the in-house designer is often the person who actually knows the product best. In this case, that was me. We were still a young brand, learning a lot through trial and error, figuring out what worked as the product line grew and occasionally discovering what didn’t only after it was already out in the world.
We succeeded regardless, building a fiercely loyal customer base along the way, but internally I learned just as much. I learned how to manage a massive inventory of SKUs and working files without losing my mind, how to think about a design system beyond the first beautiful presentation, and, probably most importantly, how to ask the right questions early enough to get the project right the first time.
