Naming, packing and selling a skincare range in fourteen weeks

There is a version of this project that takes nine months and produces something more considered. That version misses the manufacturing slot by half a year and the founder pays for the tooling anyway. So the schedule was the brief, and the way to hit it was to decide the fixed things first and never revisit them.

Week one settled the bottle, the closure and the dieline. Not the design of the label, the physical shape it had to fit. Every hour after that was spent on something that could not send us back to the start.

Naming under time pressure is mostly a search problem. We generated in three directions, screened against the trade marks register and the .co.za registry on the same afternoon, and killed anything that needed explaining twice. Thabile survived because it is a real name, it is easy to say in the languages the customer speaks, and nothing in class three stood in the way.

Verbal identity followed in two pages: what the range claims, what it will never claim, and the specific words that are not used because the regulator has views about them.

The store went live two weeks before the first pallet, taking pre orders. That is a decision with real risk attached, and it is the reason the first production run sold through. The month of social content was shot in a single day against the finished packaging, which is the only way to get thirty assets out of one studio booking.