2024
Chế's Essential Oil & Soap Packaging
Concept: fabric as pattern logic
The central idea behind the packaging is that the botanical patterns look as if they were cut from fabric rather than drawn by hand. Edges are slightly irregular. Forms are not perfectly smooth. This is deliberate — it connects the packaging visually to Chế's fashion roots, where the material itself always shows its history and its making.
Every pattern follows the same structural rule: branches and leaves are rendered as negative space, cut out from a solid colour ground. Scattered across this foliage are small accent marks — simplified flowers or fruit — that identify the specific ingredient of each scent.
The colour palette stays within Chế's established earth tones throughout: warm browns, sage greens, muted ambers. Nothing competes. The range reads as a family before any label is read.
Sustainability as a design constraint
Chế's ethos of reduction and reuse extended directly into the packaging brief. The challenge was to make products that were easy to identify and distinguish across multiple formats, while minimising production complexity and material waste.
For the essential oils, Chế offers four different bottle formats: dropper bottle, roll-on, spray, and euro dropper. Rather than commissioning four different bottle shapes, I selected standard bottles already available on the market with equivalent dimensions. This meant a single box size could serve an entire scent line regardless of which format is inside. Differentiation between formats is handled by a printed checklist on one face of the box — a row of checkboxes, one ticked to indicate which bottle type is enclosed. One box die-cut. One print run per scent. No bespoke tooling.
For the soap, the packaging is divided into two components that work together. An inner wrapping paper protects the bar directly. A printed band wraps around the outside, covering slightly more than half the bar, carrying the product information and pattern. The two layers combine to create a complete design: the pattern continues across both surfaces, and the uncoated paper of the inner wrap provides a natural texture that reinforces the handmade quality of the soap itself. Neither component is redundant. Neither requires the other to be discarded before the product can be used.
*Photography featured in this case study includes both original work and externally sourced imagery used for visual direction demonstration.