Inclusivity in Beauty – Braille and Colour Makes Sub&Tarctic Accessible To All

Agency: Redfire
Creative Director: Colin Downing
Designer: Laia Pampalona
Designer, Art direction: Lans Jiang
GAD: Donna Downing
Photography: Bryce Carleton
Location: New Zealand
Project Type: Produced
Client: Sub&Tarctic Skincare
Product Launch Location: New Zealand
Packaging Contents: Skincare
Packaging Substrate / Materials: Board, Paper, Plastic
Printing Process: Offset Printing, Foiled, Embossed, Foil Stamping, Screenprinting

The purity of the Subantarctic waters and the pristine Southern Alps, provide environments for Sub&Tarctic to wild harvest and source unique natural ingredients for their skincare formulations.

Sub&Tarctic approached us to refresh their brand identity and packaging design with ambitions to enter the US and Asian markets. They wanted their brand identity to be contemporary, and packaging to uniquely reflect the purity of their ingredients, have “pop” and colour for shelf presence.

Using their name as the key driver behind our design execution, we crafted a design system around an iceberg formation.

The new brand identity is layered, and stacks into a white “iceberg” lock up. It has texture and reflects light by using foiling and embossing in the print finish – simulating light reflections you would see in nature.

With a core brand value of inclusivity – we added Braille to the side of pack, to make our packaging accessible for the visually impaired. This tactile element added to our overall proposition – inclusivity in beauty.

The packaging design pops with vibrance of the natural palette surrounding an iceberg – with layers and shades of greens and blues which darkens as it travels down the pack, providing a platform for our product naming and details.

The overall impact reflects purity and pristine nature – but with boldness and colour, and without the use of traditional natural colour palettes seen in many competitor brands in the market.

What’s Unique?

1. The use of Braille dots on the side of each box helps the visually impaired shop the range with ease and clarity.
2. The use of bright colours to represent natural products – when the category is normally light natural hues. We took our direction from nature’s hues and colours in the Antarctic region to really showcase the splendour and vibrance.
3. The brand mark is stepped and layered like an iceberg, to make it unique, but also to make it easier to read and sound out the phonetics.