Natura is a Brazilian cosmetic brand that went trhough a big and positive change on their packaging design for their line Sou. The company is famous for its natural ingredients, its solutions for smart, eco-friendly products, and their concern with the environment and how they always focus on their user needs and wants. Sou was launched in 2012, as an approach to bring a new concept and a new value proposal to the consumer, so that the brand would occupy an intermediary price slot in the market. The design agencies that worked on Sou were Questtonó and Tátil, which, together with Natura, found the solution by focusing primarily on sustainability and their user experience.
To reach the final result, the team went through a long process involving multidisciplinary teams such as designers, pharmacists, and marketing teams. Here enters Human-Centered Desing. As Juliana Bauer says on the website designbrasil.com, the brand built an integrative team that, through Design Thinking Process, found new solutions to create a product with the least environmental impact possible.
After getting to know their user’s needs, and the environmental impact of their product regarding production, transportation and prices, they created basic sketches and small-scale prototypes for them to understand how their users would interact with the process. Here, again, the user is the main focus. In the final process they began doing real size mockups and high fidelity prototypes to see how it would work as a final result.
The final solution, like Rodrigo Maia, affirms on his website, “was an innovative approach by a cosmetics brand that adopted the pouch as the principal packaging.” As a result, “the new process requires less energy and less production time, decreases the amount of plastic in packaging by 70%, and reduces the final cost of the product by 50%. This process also enables the filing of the product to occur in the same assembly line, therefore considerably eliminated steps of production and transportation.” With that said, the packaging solution allows users to use the product until the last drop, as their tag line affirms. The dynamics of the package and how one holds it is also really comforting and organic, making it pleasant to the eyes as well as for the hands.
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