This is a packaging design story. It is also a classic quest, a new kid story, a small fish in a big pond story, and, as with every rebrand, it’s a comeback story.
This is the story of Grove Co. – an e-tailer developed brand launched into brick-and-mortar. A flagship web-native brand that found itself in a new environment, unable to rely on so many of the tools that had helped it succeed in the past. Launching in retail was the equivalent of getting to college and realizing that, though you may very well have been your high school’s star student, valedictorian and football captain, college was going to be a totally different ball game. Suddenly competing with a set full of established green competitors like Seventh Generation, Method and Mrs. Meyers and even strong private label competitors like Target’s Ever Spring brand, Grove Co. needed a retail glow up. Fast.
Enter Grove Co.’s Project Heart.
Grove Co. is the flagship owned brand of Grove Collaborative, an online marketplace dedicated to curating and creating eco-friendly brands across household cleaning, personal care, health and wellness, laundry, clean beauty, baby, and pet care. True to its parent company’s B Corp certification, the Grove Co. product line of household cleaning, laundry and air care was developed to follow strict ingredient criteria, including plant-based formulations and certified cruelty-free and ethically produced products.
Grove Co. was also a pioneer in concentrated cleaner innovation and the first mainstream cleaning brand to leverage aluminum packaging, breaking rank with our natural contemporaries to eschew post-consumer recycled (PCR) content in our drive to demonstrate leadership in reducing the consumer packaged goods industry’s reliance on plastic.
In 2021, Grove Co., the $100M+ home care brand, launched into broad retail distribution at key accounts including Target, CVS and Meijer. Despite a solid launch, the brand struggled as velocities failed to meet expectations. There were several hypotheses as to why (low brand awareness, premium price point, pandemic induced setbacks to consumers’ eco- consciousness), but, as with so many small brands with limited marketing resources, the product packaging, positioning and communication received most of the blame.
THE CHALLENGE
The story of Grove Co.’s packaging starts with the challenge of a brand designed for the direct-to-consumer space, where shoppers self select into a sustainability-focused site, not only with a limited selection of curated brands, but also the chance to read through product description pages, watch videos, devour reviews and ratings, and perform price/ounce calculations. While Grove Co.’s muted pastels, delicate font, windowless boxes and diminutive paperboard cartons made sense online, they didn’t help the brand stand out on shelf, in retail stores. Grove Co.’s products were recessive under store lights, and lacked the stopping power and compelling differentiation amid competitors.
The second challenge Grove Co. faced was the on-pack communication struggle that comes with developing products with a reduced environmental footprint – the more concentrated the cleaner the better for the environment, but the more challenging the messaging. Small packaging billboards mixed with confusing messaging hierarchies created confusion at shelf – both for shoppers and shelf stockers alike.
Lastly, experientially the packaging was cluttered and hard to read – dotted with taglines, multiple performance proof points and sustainability claims. Despite having invested significant resources in formulating with natural origin fragrance, scent felt like an afterthought.
THE GOAL
The goal of the project was to create a beautiful, experiential breakthrough design at-shelf, using our sustainable packaging and materials as the canvas. We needed to simplify our communications and learn to embrace a more nuanced approach to convey complex, multifaceted messaging. Or, as Grove Co.’s Creative Director intoned, “Front of pack IS NOT and CANNOT be our only marketing opportunity.”
In addition to increased visibility and shelf pop, the redesign had to convey premium and communicate value, dial up the experiential promise of the products, introduce our sustainability reason to believe and better communicate product category.
THE POSITIONING
Increasingly, the conversation around sustainability in consumer packaged goods is less focused on formula safety and more focused on packaging. Public demand for action on plastic waste has escalated significantly, with 84% of US consumers caring about plastic and packaging waste more than climate change or even the environment in general (80%).
Grove Collaborative, the company, had forged this movement into a mission of ambitious plastic reduction goals, as part of the initiative to revolutionize a consumer products industry built on single-use plastic. Recognizing that less than 5% of plastic gets recycled, no matter how much you put in the recycling bin, it wasn’t enough to rely on PCR, we needed to stop relying on plastic altogether.
In a meeting with Grove Collaborative’s co-founder, Stu Landesberg, the team lit on the concept of Optimistic Home Care – highlighting the urgency to drive change but with a positive, action-oriented disposition. We adopted Go Beyond PlasticTM as our tagline, drafting our brand manifesto to reflect this positioning: We are an optimistic home care brand. We believe we can change consumer behavior, the industry, and the world, for good. We want to make sustainability beautiful, marrying industry leading packaging innovation that helps the consumer Go Beyond PlasticTM with delightful experiences natural consumers have come to expect.
We believed we were on the right track when it came to packaging choices we’d made, but we needed to better highlight the materials used to present Grove Co. as the solution to the consumer’s unaddressed sustainability concern – how to Go Beyond Plastic in home care – and do it in a way that would make sustainable packaging beautiful and counterworthy.
THE DESIGN PROCESS
Going Beyond Plastic isn’t easy – as a consumer or as a consumer packaged goods company. By focusing the visual branding on Grove Co.’s unique differentiation – our material selection – we could at last showcase the significant effort invested, while helping the consumer understand the rationale for our reduced plastic choices and helping her choose Grove Co. as her partner for the next step on her sustainability journey.
To get to the heart of the new Grove Co. look and feel, we started with our hand and dish soap bottles, working through countless rounds of packaging options from more boldly color-coated bottles to fully pared-back minimalist designs, finally landing on the concept of stripping the coating off our bottles to let the brushed aluminum shine through, putting fragrance cues front and center.
The decision to elevate fragrance illustrations from an icon to a central component of the redesign was driven by the desire to present Grove Co. as a more experiential brand, leaning into our beautiful natural origin fragrances. Dish and hand designs became knocked-out negatives of one another, reserving the aluminum-forward version for dish – a more efficacy-driven category – and leaning into more color coverage on hand – which is traditionally a more fragrance driven category. This allowed for better differentiation between formats at-shelf while still letting scent unite the assortment.
Two decisions played a key role in helping establish Grove Co. as a standalone brand, rather than a subsidiary of Grove Collaborative, to help combat consumer confusion and improve retailer buy-in.
The original redesign concepts had minimized use of “Grove Blue” a dark teal prominent in Grove Collaborative branding that had served as a common design element between parent company and sub-brand, raising concerns that we were walking away from brand equity. However, Grove Blue, used widely in the original design, had shown itself to have limited retail shelf pop. In the end, the new design nods to tradition by using Grove Blue for the brand name as well as pump components on our ready-to-use products. Another critical unlock came in rendering the Grove Co. logo stacked, rather than in-line, which allowed us to enlarge the brand name on predominantly vertically oriented packaging.
With the key design elements decided on, we pared back front of pack copy to the bare essentials, breaking from the more verbose style currently favored in our categories, letting the scent illustrations speak to experiential promise, and allowing the materials to provide the sustainability reason to believe.
Most aluminum in the market today is coated, with the majority being matte coated. Our design called for a glossy finish transparent ink treatment. This new way of treating aluminum was a cornerstone of the new design, but it was also a departure from the easiest way to conceal aluminum’s flaws.
Even for industry-leading aluminum manufacturing partner Ball Corporation, the process of using transparent inks was a new challenge. Grove worked closely with Ball to painstakingly perfect the opacity and color selection on bottles, striking the fine balance of ensuring that the colors were bold and bright enough on-shelf that they popped, but not so opaque as to dull the aluminum’s shine. The team explored several different varnishes, originally selecting an industry standard matte coat before making the switch to an unconventional glossy varnish to enhance vibrancy and shine. A last minute hiccup in production presented the team with another unforeseen implication of transparent ink on aluminum – striping on the bottle shoulders, a very common side effect of the bottle forming process and typically a non-issue due to opaque aluminum coatings. Together with Ball, the team made on-the-fly adjustments to the tool and production process to address the striping without compromising the design.
Packaging for concentrated cleaners was up next. After struggling to make space for the many competing messages on the small box, the team finally took a cue from our earlier mandate and leaned into omnichannel marketing tenets – opting for a design featuring a backer card specifically for retail shelves, while allowing the original carton to live on DTC, where there was more opportunity for product communication.
Expanded real estate allowed us to elevate category in the hierarchy and help alleviate product confusion. Instead of relying on graphic backdrops to convey surfaces, we unified category communication under one category-normative color (i.e., blue for glass cleaner, aqua for bathroom cleaner) and included a top-of-pack color swatch to assist with at-shelf identification. A concentrate bottle and spray bottle icon helped communicate value while a color stripe and minimalist scent illustration cued fragrance, a second consideration in more efficacy-driven cleaning categories.
After experimenting with various substrates, including white paperboard and natural fiber paper we leaned into kraft paperboard as the natural corollary to our aluminum. The choice helped convey sustainability, cued “natural” with the consumer and reinforced the recyclability message of our Forest Stewardship Council-certified cartons. A front window showed off the glass bottles, helping support more premium positioning.
The most challenging task was figuring out how to make kraft paper, which is recessive by its very nature, pop at-shelf. Working closely with Neyenesch Paper, the team experimented with laying down multiple hits of white to ensure the colors remained vibrant and not muddy while also working to match Pantone Matching System (PMS) colors across different mediums and giving our paperboard packaging a right to shine right alongside our aluminum.
CONCLUSION:
Though the story is still being written, the moral is already clear – this redesign process was bigger than packaging. It gave a brand with a unique sustainability reason-to-be an improved platform to reach more consumers and bring change to more homes. It has empowered Grove Co. to grow into itself as a compelling standalone brand. It gave a startup underdog with an audacious environmental mission the opportunity to demonstrate that Going Beyond PlasticTM was not only possible, it could be beautiful.
Every story deserves a happy ending. This rebrand is helping write a new one for Grove Co. and, hopefully, by enabling consumer behavior change and industry change, the planet. And that would be the biggest comeback story of all.
