Cohesion doesn’t mean sameness. Savor difference.
A packaging strategy and identity as gorgeous as this D2C company’s subscription spice blends
Project Services
- Branding
- Packaging
- Art Direction
- Digital
The Gorgeous Spice Company
- Jean Bataille
A longtime client with a deep background in advertising and creative strategy came to us for help building a subscription spice brand where every month’s signature blend would arrive with a narrative that was alive and tangible. It’s no fun for ongoing customers if there’s no surprise. Each blend would need to have its own clear identity, but still feel like it came from the same source, whether somebody picked it up in their mailbox or in one of the carefully curated regional retail outlets in which they can be found.
The Gorgeous identity — irreverent, flexible, deceptively chaotic — is rooted in a playful pastiche of pop cultural touchstones, from astrology through to tiki, from film noir to westerns. Think of Gorgeous as an adventurous record label, with a market of fans ready to trust in their offbeat choices, excited for each new release. The blends are packaged with recipes, kitchen playlists, and product recommendations. Despite the individual identity and typography for each blend, a subtle brand system emerges through cues such as a repetition of core colors.
Every story is a blend.
With each month’s blend, Gorgeous would come to us with an underlying plan for their blend. From there, we would dive into deep ongoing generative conversations and shared historical and cultural research. The resulting ideas came from the sparks of these conversations between the client and ourselves, as we would continue to surprise each other and build on references to arrive at unexpected but just-right-seeming references for each blend.
“Otherness is super talented, no doubt! And they bring a cultural literacy and a reverence for strategic thinking to every project that makes for a brilliant creative partnership. The branding and packaging that Otherness developed for The Gorgeous Spice Company is so distinctive and eye-catching that both customers and retailers want it on their shelves.”
Lindan Courtemanche, founder of The Gorgeous Spice Company
Practicality is a gorgeous trait.
As maximalist as the designs may appear, the packaging is optimized for business and distribution logic. With art on the front and recipes in the back, the zippy packages for the spice blends were designed to fit flat through a standard mail slot. The adhesive labels on the actual spice packages are peel-and-repeel, meaning that customers can take them off and put them on their own spice jars.
