Vidalforce

The brief

Vidalforce was already a successful men's haircare brand in Spain — their original product added fibres to hair to thicken it, and it had real commercial traction in its home market. The brief was to take that brand and extend it into a completely new territory: a full gender-inclusive range covering serums and shampoos for both men and women, designed to launch on Amazon and into retail.

What they had before I started was a brown box with black text and a logo. Functional, but not a brand. It communicated nothing about the product's quality, its natural ingredients, or its ambition to compete in the premium personal care space.

The creative challenge

The packaging system needed to do several things simultaneously. It had to be coherent enough that the full range read as a single brand family on an Amazon listing or a retail shelf. It had to clearly differentiate men's and women's products without the two lines feeling like separate brands. And it had to feel natural and premium — appropriate for a product making a quality claim about ingredients.

The Amazon context was particularly important. Packaging that works on a physical shelf and packaging that works as a thumbnail on a product listing are not the same design problem — the thumbnail needs to communicate the product and the brand at very small sizes, which means hierarchy and clarity matter more than detail.

The starting point was natural flora photography — using the actual ingredients as the visual language of the brand rather than abstract design devices.

Building the system

The packaging architecture was designed as a modular system from the start — not individual SKUs designed one at a time, but a shared structure that every product in the range would slot into. That meant establishing the grid, the typographic hierarchy, the photography treatment and the colour logic before designing a single product, so that adding new SKUs later wouldn't require redesigning from scratch.

• Shared layout grid across all products — same structural logic, same proportions, same information hierarchy applied consistently regardless of product type or gender line.
• Natural ingredient photography direction — worked with a photographer to capture the botanical elements specific to each product formulation, so the imagery was genuine rather than generic stock.
• Colour palette system — developed distinct but related palettes for men's and women's lines, with enough tonal difference to differentiate clearly while keeping the brand family coherent across the full range.
• Amazon asset production — created all the required product listing images, including lifestyle shots and detail images, designed to the specific requirements of Amazon's product page format.
• The system was documented clearly enough that new products could be added by the brand without requiring a designer to revisit every visual decision from scratch.

The outcome

Vidalforce launched on Amazon with a coherent packaging system that bore no resemblance to the brown box they'd started with. The flora photography gave the brand an immediate visual identity that communicated natural ingredients and product quality without relying on copy to do that work. The colour differentiation between the lines was clear enough to navigate on both a product listing and a retail shelf.

This was freelance work completed during the 2020 lockdown — one of several projects I took on during that period to keep developing skills outside my day-to-day role. Packaging for a consumer health brand competing on Amazon is a very specific design discipline, and getting the Amazon hierarchy right requires understanding how people actually shop on the platform — quickly, on mobile, making decisions from thumbnails — which is a different brief to packaging for a physical retail environment.