Late in 2005, a former client and friend, Dean Chrystal called saying he was developing a new product line of shampoos and conditioners that were infused with natural scents that could, in theory, help reduce ones desire to eat thereby becoming the first line of appetite suppressant hair products. He sent me his initial concept layouts for the product line he’d been calling “Celebrity Secrets”.

It may be a little hard to see from the sample above, but the designs sent to me for review basically used repeated stars knocked out of a color strip with the word “celebrity” overprinted in blue and green, or silver and brown, or silver and black, or silver and orange with the design running vertically up the side of an opaque plastic bottle. The designs weren’t very dynamic and one of the main reasons Dean contacted me and asked if I could look at these for him.

I took the basic elements of these designs, changed how they would be used, altered the colors to show how the might reflect different products, chose what I felt was a more appropriate logotype font and applied these changes to the clear Voss-style bottle Dean was thinking he would go into production with.

These concepts were from the first group I redesigned for Dean.

I then created three of my own concepts for Dean to consider that I felt played off the infused scents for each product and to show him a possible alternative direction he might want to explore. This included a “CS” logo and logotype, colorized photos of the scents, and tinted caps to complete the wrapper for each product design.

After looking over his designs and logo executions, I suggested that “Celebrity” was also didn’t work as Dean had originally thought, as he hadn’t inked a deal with any “celebrity” to endorse the product after a few months of negotiation.

That’s why I created the name “Slenderizing Secrets” as an alternate to Celebrity Secrets and presented it to dean because the core benefit of the product was still the potential for helping to suppress ones appetite and indirectly help them to lose weight. The “beauty” aspect of this product line had not been considered by Dean up to this point, so I presented three bottle designs which did by playing off the “eternal beauty” of Roman and Greek statues. This also solved a budget issue which would come from “endorsement, model and usage fees” which the client would not have to pay using this design approach.

These new designs got the client incredibly excited as he had decided to create his own molds to blow his own bottles. I used this opportunity to show Dean a couple of concepts where the bottle also reflected the benefit of the product. These designs featured a bottle which gradually tapered in the center and return to the original size at the base.

With (A) being the Voss-style bottle, the bottle concepts I designed had a slimming quality to them and looked like something a product that helped control ones appetite should come in. Two designs that wouldn’t work off the bat were (B) & (D), the first being chunky in design and the later (D) being ultimately to thin. I also created the first bottle-bottle design (E) which allowed for greater design elements to be printed on the outer bottle and the slimming nature reflected by the inner bottle.

Dean and the bottling company both agreed on my “D” design as being very practical to produce and unlike any other current bottles or packing on the shelves.

The next phase of the design process was going back and looking at what had original been created and see how they also might be used on the bottles. This was the only way Dean could move forward and know he hadn’t passed on a possible successful design.  As we were now going to blow are own bottles, I also looked at blowing raised designs into the plastic to represent the scents or the name of the products.

I also started to layout additional copy and tag lines I had developed. Below are two of the those revisited directions.

About this time, Dean had shown his concept to a number of people. Each one had their own opinion on what the bottle should do and what the name of the company should actually be.

This next group of designs was from the two weeks I spent redesigning the the label with the new “working” company name — Olatheraphy, their new working tagline, and the logo suggestion to develop an “S” that looked somewhat like a nose.

After I spent this time developing the designs Dean’s growing focus group had started asking for, Dean and I had a long conversation regarding how everyone’s input was killing this project and causing him to doubt his gut.

I was ready to walk on this project, but as Dean’s friend I still wanted to help so I asked the bottle making engineers if it were possible to blow a bottle inside another bottle. They’d never done it, but they were excited and positive that it could be accomplished. So I created one more design. This was inspired by the idea that the outer body of the bottle represented the somewhat overweight girlfriend (one of the focus group experts) of the pizza delivery guy, while the inner, slender bottle represented the original concept of the “slenderizing” effect of the product. The increase surface area on the face of the bottle allowed for a larger area to place type.

This is what my final design looked like. I say “final”, because the focus group thought it might be cool to incorporate stars and possibly use the increased surface area of the bottle to add more color, and with more color you’d might not need the inner bottle, and what about the name, shouldn’t be something more like “olatherapy”, blah, blah, blah…

At some point, the agency or the client will realize they’ve reached a point of diminishing returns. I swore that before I simply ended up executing someone else’s cobbled together concepts to pay my bills, I’d resign the business. That’s just what I did after this one last attempt to hit my concept out of the park.