Feel good package design that hooks consumers where it matters most: in the shower.

When you found your perfect shower gel, was it love at first sniff? Probably not. When it comes to shower products – be it for cleansing your body or eradicating mildew – packaging is everything. You’d think that social responsibility starts with a good scrub down, but the eco innards are almost secondary to a product’s efficient, streamlined, biodegradable, recyclable, reusable or otherwise feel-good skin.

Take, for example, the German brand Stop the Water While Using Me!, designed by award-winning agency KOREFE. The brief was: “develop a brand for a high-quality range of cosmetics that meet the increasing requirements of an ecologically aware society and set new standards in environmental protection.” The innovation being, “the message is the brand.”

Clean black and white packaging with a casual font (Ana Regular), plus clever copy about not wasting water equals one tempting purchase. Never mind that the product range does, in fact, require water for use and that the country of origin does not actually have a water issue. It’s an international branding exercise at the source – and the package is all that counts.

Two other eco, organic or otherwise “feel good” shower products that rely on a similarly sleek sell?

Philosophy, “a brand that approaches personal care from a skin care point of view, while celebrating the beauty of the human spirit.” they also employ the use of lowercase letters, exclusively, to drive their point into your homes and bathrooms. the point being: there is no “i” in buy me.

And the Estée Lauder eco-brand Origins, founded in 1990 as a botanical treatment line designed for the environmentally conscious consumer who doesn’t mind spending $13 on a bar of bath soap. The company also owns Prescriptives and Clinique demonstrating that personal care relies not only on fabulous packaging, but on a really good name – and potential medical intervention, too.

That’s not to say that the shower and beauty products mentioned above aren’t what they portend to be, or that their core messages aren’t good for humanity. Simply consider their inclusion here as another branding exercise, one that proves eco is still a big sell and that altruism reigns when we’re at our most vulnerable: naked and dirty.

That being said, we really like this vegan, handmade, cold-pressed soap operation run out of Oregon – and their excellent packaging.

Perhaps it’s just a matter of time before Prunella gets picked up by eco-branding company extraordinaire Hain Celestial Group and marketed on the shelves of a Whole Foods near you.

The post Saving the Planet One Package At a Time? appeared first on EcoSalon.

Celestial Seasonings has been blending healthy teas with environmental consciousness since 1969. Now, they are expanding their environmental consciousness to the planting of trees in developing countries.

They’ve teamed up with Trees for the Future (a non-profit organization that has planted more 70 million trees in Central America, Africa, and Asia in the past 20 years) and aim to sponsor the planting of one million trees. They’re nearly there, but how about a little love from EcoSalon readers?

Every box of Celestial Seasonings tea bought between January 1 and March 31, 2009 will ensure the planting of a tree. But you don’t have to be a tea drinker to participate. Anyone can stop by their online website and plant a tree in the virtual forest until the end of April. For each online tree planted, Celestial Seasonings will sponsor the planting of one real tree in a developing country.  Their interactive program that turns “virtual trees” into reality also provides information about why trees are good not only for the environmental but also the economies of the developing nations where they are being planted.

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