Solvei

Solvei came to me with a formulation they were proud of and a bottle they were not. The brief was framed as a packaging job. Two conversations in it was clear the actual problem was that nobody at the company could say, in one sentence, what made the products different — which is why every label draft ended up carrying four sentences.

Finding the sentence

We spent the first week interviewing the chemist rather than the founders. What came out of it was unglamorous and useful: the formulations are deliberately short. Six ingredients where a competitor uses twenty. That was the whole identity, sitting in a spreadsheet nobody had thought to show a designer.

So the system got short too. One weight of one typeface. A number on the front, the ingredient count, set larger than the product name. No adjectives anywhere on the primary panel — they moved to the back, where someone standing in a shop has actually decided to read.

Designing for 12 millimetres

The serum is the smallest bottle in the range and it drove every decision. If the mark did not survive at 12mm it did not exist. We tested every candidate as a laser-etched sample before drawing anything at full size, which killed three directions in a morning and saved about a month.

The constraint that looks like a limitation is usually the brief. The serum label was the brief.

What shipped

Nine products, one production run, a set of rules short enough that the founder can lay out a new SKU herself in an afternoon. That last part was the real deliverable. A system nobody can operate is a rebrand with an expiry date.