Holistic Product Design with L'Oreal's Packaging Innovation Team

The brands of L’Oreal are known for providing beautiful and captivating products that are built on not only high-performing formulations, but are caringly enclosed in creative packaging and applicators that are as eloquent as they are soundly engineered.

To create this holistic approach, elevating packaging and design to sit equally at the table with formulations provided by our outstanding research and innovation groups (R&I) is a challenging task. Packaging design does not start with pen to paper sketching or the rapid protoyping technologies that we have all seen glamorized on the surface of product development. The role of the designer starts far earlier with research and information gathering: we deeply understand our product and brands; we understand our global consumer’s motivations, behavior and gestures; we define packaging parameters, select materials, and align with our formulation, production and manufacturing teams as close to the beginning of the project as possible. Even with all of this organization and information in place, we realize that there is still a great deal of abstraction and ambiguity in bridging these foundations to a “must have!” product. Through packaging design we synthesize the brand desires to the brief, providing spontaneous and unconventional inventions and creative ideas at first as metaphors to understand what our marketing and creative teams like and dislike (both equally useful paths of information for design!), and iterate/tune these ideas using consumer-centric methodologies and feedback to quickly hone in on unique concepts that resonate and compel.

The precise mix of packaging design, engineering and formulation is as deeply the DNA of our stand-out products as are our individual brand attitudes and passion. The take away from this presentation is that “to design” is not just creativity and beauty on its tangible face. Holistic packaging design elevates and differentiates our world class brands as a journey through rich user-experiences, learning and diverse story-telling; the bridging of technical complexities into human context; and putting safety and security at the forefront of all that we provide.