Design: Emunah
Location: Israel
Project Type: Produced
Client: The Drop Shop
Product Launch Location: Israel
Packaging Contents: E-Liquid
Packaging Substrate / Materials: Plastic bottle
Printing Process: Digital Printing
The Drop Shop is a boutique e-liquid shop in Israel with two retail locations and a growing market value. Unlike most local competitors, The Drop Shop hand mixes and tests all their products directly in their stores. They offer a unique “build-it-yourself” model for e-liquid where customers are encouraged to test and try various combinations on location.
Above all things, it was important to represent the company’s hand-made approach and commitment to personalized satisfaction in their branding and packaging. While many e-liquid brands appear ultra clean and modern, we wanted to position The Drop Shop as approachable, warm, and friendly.
Working closely with the store owner and manager, we developed an identity that aimed to do just that. The logo and branding system are masculine (as 90% of their customer base is made up of men), but with a touch warmth running through it. The primary logo is made up of a custom, bold serif font, paired with a handwritten script and soft details. The primary mark is a bold “Drop” which reveals the lowercase letter “d” in its negative space.
The color palette has been built out to support a wide array of flavors and SKUs, while still staying true to the brand. Using this color palette, we developed a unique marble pattern per flavor profile. This marble is used on the e-liquid packaging as well as marketing materials. The marbles were developed in a way that makes it accessible for them to edit in-house, should more flavors be developed.
In sum, the pieces I developed for this project were brand strategy, brand identity, packaging design, packaging design system, signage design, menu design.
What’s Unique?
There were a particularly large amount of limitations in the packaging design, which make the successful outcome that much more unique. For one, legal restrictions are very strict surrounding selling e-liquid products, so the warning symbol had to take up 1/3 of all showing surfaces of the packaging. Secondly, it had to be understandable in Hebrew and English. And thirdly, The Drop Shop has a tremendous amount of flavors – 40 flavors, and they are each sold in three sizes. To that end, we had to develop a very large but cohesive packaging design system that differentiated products but also held together as a brand. Each flavor has its own unique “marble” generated from the brand’s extended color palette. Details like these made this project uniquely strategic in the way it had to be developed.