So what is the Femme Den? Put simply, it’s a grassroots movement within international design agency Smart Design that specialises in designing products that address women’s needs, opening up the potential to increase sales by connecting with this audience.
The Femme Den was founded in 2005 by four international members of Smart Design’s staff: Erica Eden (American), Agnete Enga (Norwegian), Yvonne Lin (Chinese-American) and Gina Reimann (British), to draw connections between social, cultural and economic changes in design to satisfy the needs of female consumers.
Our judges included these design experts alongside Smart Design director of brand communication, Paulette Bluhm-Sauriol.
While all the products under review exhibited a high degree of creativeness, some had better brand presence, packaging design and marketing than others, according to the Femme Den. However, the team were troubled by how the packaging advertised the functionality of the drinks.
“One of our main observations about all these packages is that women don’t necessarily want to advertise that they have to fix a specific problem, whether it be skin beauty, fitness or digestive health. Such promotion doesn’t offer a positive reflection about the consumer to others watching them drink the beverage.”
So the lesson here is simple: brands should take care when advertising the functionality for an aqua plus product, and think twice about how the functional benefits are spelt out on-pack while allowing consumers to feel comfortable with how they’re sharing such information with their peers at the point of consumption.
“Another overall observation is that when we first looked at the bottles, you can usually see a single message conveyed. But when you dig deeper to find out what these waters offer, the content provided to the consumers on the websites communicate brand stories better, and so these messages could be executed better on the packs.”
Right now, one of the things we see is shrinking and pinking designs, which identifies to consumers that such products are ‘for women’, but what we’re seeing from most of these enhanced water products is flowering. You see this trend in other products areas too, such as cosmetics packaging to the recently launched Vivienne Tam Special Edition Laptop, which has flowers splayed across it. Such designs aren’t necessarily meaningful to women.
Another point is that these packages are overtly for women, yet by using this approach, you’re automatically excluding half of the population for no particular reason.
If the drinks possess benefits specifically aimed at improving female health, such as building bone structure, then it may be necessary to highlight the product as something for women in the design. However, if the product is something that would be mutually beneficial to men, then why not try more of a gender-neutral design?
And you can say a product is for women on-pack, but design it in such a way that they could be readily picked up by men. For example, a Luna bar is an energy bar for women and spells this out plainly on the pack, but you often see men consuming the product, too.
See the products under scrutiny in our special gallery.
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