Body care brand Eos recently hit the social media jackpot when a video posted by @kevin.preston.white received 2.5 million views, letting guys in on his secret to smelling good: Eos’ Vanilla Cashmere Body Lotion. Men rushed to buy the body lotion and started posting videos persuading other guys to follow suit, much to the dismay of women who feared that all the new male attention would lead to a product shortage. It was a digital battle of the sexes over body lotion, and Eos was caught squarely in the middle.
The brand responded by creating a “lotion lock,” designed to protect women from having their precious Eos Vanilla Cashmere Lotion stolen by their partners and friends. The custom packaging features a lock on the pump that opens based on combinations of letters, numbers, and emojis.
“We love that the Eos community is forever taking this brand to unexpected places," Carley Caldas, VP of Brand Marketing and Media at Eos, said in a statement. "Our strategy has always been to listen to our fans and react accordingly and with lightning speed—so we are part of the conversation in a way that provides authentic value. There's so much joy and surprise in this approach, because you never know where people are going to take the brand next. Yesterday, we were launching a limited edition line of Bless Your F*ing Cooch shave cream; today we're protecting women's Eos products with the lotion lock, tomorrow ... well, that’s for the community to tell us."
The innovative packaging concept is still in development, but interested consumers can show their support for the lotion lock prototype by visiting eoslotionlock.com and providing their name and email address to be notified when the lotion lock officially launches. Participants will also be entered to receive a bottle of the popular lotion while supplies last.
The lotion lock concept was made in partnership with Eos’ creative agency of record, Mischief @ No Fixed Address. “We knew we had to act fast, so we rapidly designed locking mechanisms on the Eos Body Lotion bottle,” Hunter Fine, Creative Director at Mischief, says of the creative concept. “Of all the ways to stop men from stealing their lady’s lotion, we thought the simplest deterrent was just adding a little bit of effort to make it not worth it.”
In just a few days of the concept release, #eoslotionlock gained 2.3 million hashtag views on TikTok, and the brand reported overwhelmingly positive consumer sentiment across social media. Eos’ Vanilla Cashmere Body Lotion became one of the fastest-growing body lotions in the US and achieved the number one ranking on Amazon's Best Sellers Body Lotion list. Eos shared that the brand has been shifting ten bottles of Vanilla Cashmere every single minute for the past six months.
It’s no surprise that Eos is willing to experiment with packaging design. In 2009, the brand launched its signature ball-shaped lip balms in a rainbow of colors. Eos’ lip balms quickly came to dominate the stagnant lip balm category, and by 2016, it had outpaced Chapstick and Blistex, which have been around for far longer, to become the second best-selling lip balm in the country, after Burt’s Bees. It wasn’t the formula that consumers gravitated towards (Customers brought a class action lawsuit against the company in 2016 that claimed its lip balms caused their skin to crack, bleed, and blister, which was settled out of court the same year, and Eos was not required to change any of its ingredients.), but the innovative circular packaging, which helped the product stand out among the rows of cylindrical lip balm tubes.
“We had to do it in a way that was not gimmicky, so that it would stand the test of time,” Sanjiv Mehra, Eos co-founder and Managing Partner, told Fast Company. “We had to make a product and a package that would be seen as useful for a very long time.”
Eos worked with Collins, a design agency led by Brian Collins, to reimagine the packaging for the brand’s lip balm. Collins’ innovative design was predicated on the idea that women struggle to find their lip balm in their cluttered purses. Lip balms that come in a tube can be mistaken for any number of items one might have in their purse, from eyeliner to lipstick to a roll of mints. Collins’ strategy to help Eos stand out was to improve the packaging experience.
“In partnership with Eos, we helped create packaging that could be recognized in the dark—or a cluttered bag—simply by touching it,” says Collins in a statement on its website. “We also defined a design system with an array of magnetic colors that cued flavor and caught the eye.”
Packaging provides an opportunity for a product to differentiate itself in a competitive category, and Eos isn’t the only skincare brand to utilize creative packaging concepts to attract customers and drive sales. Soft Services recently relaunched its viral hand cream, Theraplush, which comes in an elevated reusable jar that’s designed to be displayed on your bedside table. The refillable pump was modeled after ancient jade artifacts and is a work of art in itself. The magnetic cap serves multiple functions—users can take off their jewelry and place it on the dipped surface of the magnetized lid for safekeeping. Additionally, the magnetic cap makes it easy to "close" the lid on the hand cream without any twisting and turning, which is difficult to do with just-moisturized hands.
The intentional design also speaks to how and when the hand cream should be applied. Theraplush is an overnight treatment and is best applied nightly as the last step before bed. The beautiful packaging is designed to be displayed, not hidden away on a bathroom shelf or stuffed at the bottom of your purse. Users take photos of the product on their nightstand, which helps spread organic awareness and drives sales.
Like Eos, Soft Services took a product that was ripe for disruption and reimagined it, using packaging design to solve some of the most common consumer problems. For brands looking to enter a crowded category, innovative packaging design can be the differentiating factor that sets your brand apart and highlights its unique value proposition.
