Elva Skincare

An identity and packaging system for a skincare range that needed to look expensive without looking cold.

Year: 2024
Location: Johannesburg
Duration: 6 weeks

Client: Elva Skincare
Role: Brand identity, Packaging, Digital tokens
Discipline: Brand & Graphic
Delivered: 2024 · 6 weeks

The problem

What we were actually solving

Skincare branding defaults to bright white, hard shadow and a sans-serif in all caps. Elva's products are dark-bottled and their customers are in their forties. The category convention was actively working against the price point.

The approach

How the work was made

The system leans warm: greys and bone rather than white, a humanist serif for the wordmark, and a label grid that lets an eight-product range stay coherent while each product remains findable on a shelf at arm's length.

Packaging was designed for the constraint that mattered most: these bottles are photographed in low, directional daylight, and foil or gloss would have fought the shadows. Everything is uncoated stock with a single blind deboss.

Because the store was launching at the same time, the identity was delivered as design tokens as well as a PDF, so the Shopify theme and the packaging came out of the same colour and type definitions rather than approximating each other.

The outcome

The system carried a range expansion from four products to eleven without a redesign, and is still being extended by the brand's in-house designer.

Products the label system absorbed without a redesign: 4 → 11Products the label system absorbed without a redesign
Token set shared by packaging and the store: 1Token set shared by packaging and the store
Weeks from kickoff to print-ready artwork: 6Weeks from kickoff to print-ready artwork
Foils, glosses or spot varnishes used: 0Foils, glosses or spot varnishes used