When luxury home fragrance line Marie Todd was looking to increase sales, it started with elevating its brand with a packaging redesign. Lisa Marie Todd — a former “fly girl” alongside JLo on the 90’s show In Living Color — started her Marie Todd brand with a small handmade jewelry collection. As her business evolved she added luxury home fragrances, personal fragrances, and the MTodd home fragrance collection for men to her offering.
With a growing product line, Todd realized her branding needed to evolve too, so reached out to Marilyn Prado, creative director at Prado Studio for help. According to Prado, the existing packaging was a natural Kraft-type paper that didn’t fully present Marie Todd as a high-end luxury product, so the team focused the redesign on elevating the brand through packaging.
Prado began the redesign process by considering the buyer’s emotional connection to the brand, the human response to scent and color — what color comes to mind when you smell lavender, and so on. With 12 fragrances in the line, and the need to bridge women’s and men’s lines within one brand, Prado opted to represent each of the 12 fragrances with its own unique color, and designing the packaging to include combinations of PMS colors, gold foil stamping and embossing.
In search of the perfect paper, Prado selected Neenah CLASSIC® Linen Papers for its tactile quality and high-end luxury appeal; she also knew from experience with the paper that it would perform well with the various production techniques that were part of the design. Prado collaborated with Vanguard Printing to produced box wraps for the rigid boxes that hold the substantially weighted candles, and folding carton to house the diffuser scents. Prado says Neenah had all the weights for every application needed for all the materials created in the rebrand; from stationery and envelopes, to folding carton and box wraps. Concludes Prado: “When you pick up a box and feel the texture of the paper, the smoothness of the foil and the dimension of the emboss, it almost feels as if you’re holding a piece of Marie Todd jewelry in your hand.”
