Fjordlys

Fjordlys sold well in pharmacies and badly everywhere else. In a pharmacy, staff explained the cold-water extraction and customers bought it. On an unattended shelf — department stores, hotel retail, their own site — the range lost to brands with a tenth of the science and ten times the clarity.

The diagnosis was not a logo problem. Four separate bottle systems had been added product by product over six years. Nothing on the outside of any of them said what the inside actually did differently.

We stopped treating the extraction process as a technical footnote and made it the identity. Every Fjordlys product now carries its extraction temperature and depth as a typographic mark — 4°C, 30m — set in the same position, at the same size, on every single unit.

That decision did the work three other decisions would have. It created a recognisable shelf pattern, it gave the range a rational order, and it made the claim checkable, which is the only kind of claim a sceptical customer believes.

We reduced four bottle systems to one silhouette in four volumes, then let colour carry the range. Each product family prints in two inks that overlap on the label — the overlap is the family's colour, so a customer reading the shelf sees three groups before reading a single word.

The labels are printed on uncoated stock with a water-resistant varnish only where the type sits. Wet hands smear a fully coated label; they cannot smear this one. That detail came from watching eight people use the products in their own bathrooms, not from a brand workshop.

The range launched across 340 unattended retail doors without staff explanation for the first time. The extraction mark became the thing customers photographed, which gave the launch campaign its whole art direction for free.