Editors’ Choice Award Winner: Fragrance
Donna Karan Gold
by The Estée Lauder Companies
Certain elements have become signatures of Donna Karan’s designs. Modern jewelry and colors of black and gold often accent her runways. The packaging for Donna Karan Gold embraces all of these features, including a hammered-gold sleeve designed by Karan’s collaborator and jeweler Robert Lee Morris.
“The luxury and seduction of Donna Karan Gold is captured in the packaging,” says Veronique Gabai-Pinsky, president of The Estée Lauder Companies’ Aramis and designer fragrance division. “This is the first time that Donna has collaborated with jewelry designer and longtime friend Robert Lee Morris on a fragrance creation. The bottle that was born from this creative union reflects the inner softness and outer strength of a woman. The packaging is pure Donna.”
Supplied by Pochet, the rectangular flint-glass bottle was sprayed amber. G. Pivaudran created the aluminum sleeve, which was anodized and formed to resemble hammered gold. “The texture of the aluminum was engraved,” says Marc Pivaudran, president of G. Pivaudran. “The challenge was to achieve a handcrafted finish using industrial methods.”
Producing the ebony wood cap was also a challenge. “Wood is very difficult to work with because it is a natural material. The grain varies from piece to piece,” says Wayne LoPrete, vice president of global package development for Estée Lauder, who oversaw the package’s development. “One of the challenges was to find a wood grain that was not overly pronounced because a pronounced grain would have looked too masculine. We also wanted the wood to be a certain color so that when the wood is stained and sealed, the color would be consistent.”
Maticplast produced the cap. “The wood is furniture-grade ash and is processed for a minimum of six months in a special kiln-dry process to ensure its integrity and stability,” says John Vaccaro, marketing and package development for Maticplast. The cap’s inner piece is polypropylene. The final coloring and topcoat lacquers were applied using a special lacquer-curing process.
Other suppliers include Landerer for the black carton and Rexam Dispensing Systems, which provided super-low-profile pumps with an etched black finish.
For The Estée Lauder Companies, environmental friendliness is a key concern. For Donna Karan Gold, the designers made sure that the glass bottle and the metal sleeve could be separated and sorted for recycling. To make this possible, the company rejected using conventional materials such as glue or double-faced tape to adhere the sleeve to the bottle. Those would have made it difficult for consumers to separate the parts. Instead, the U-shaped sleeve slips over the top of the bottle, covering its front and back walls. Nibs on the sleeve’s bottom edges lock into a plastic piece supplied by G. Pivaudran that covers the bottle’s bottom. These nibs are sturdy enough to keep the sleeve on the bottle, but are flexible enough to allow the sleeve to be removed. A pictograph on the carton instructs customers how to do this. G. Pivaudran performed the bottle assembly.
“The challenge was engineering this feature, while preserving the integrity of the design,” says LoPrete.
It may be up to consumers to recycle the packaging, but it’s nice to know that a large company like Estée Lauder strives to make this possible. “They’ve done a very responsible thing here from a sustainability standpoint,” says panelist Peter Hargraves, section head for Procter & Gamble global packaging and device development, cosmetics.