We decided to relaunch the evolve range in January which was only about 6 months ago. It has fulfilled my ambitions for our new studio to become a place we can innovate and create really special products that we hope people will love. We threw ourselves into the project to get the new range launched as soon as possible, and have been incredibly busy, so we haven't had much time to share the process with our customers, which we hope to do more of when we create our next set of new evolve products to add to the new range this Autumn.
I had been working on lots of new ideas for products which had come from speaking to existing customers and retailers about the range. We wanted to keep some of the best products that people loved in the range and add some lovely new products which would make the most of our new hand made artisanal studio.
I started doing some hand blending of fragrance in January and February, which was slightly derailed by my sense of smell completely changing when I found out I was pregnant! Luckily the fragrance for our citrus blend aromatic wash and lotion was already developed at this point. Once new baby arrives in October I plan to blend more organic and essential oil based fragrances to create new washes and lotions and I will definitely be involving customers in this new project when it happens.
In February and March we worked on the bases which our new fragrances would be going into. Lots of blending of oil samples and trialling went on. My skin has never been so pampered. By the end of March we knew what the new range was going to feel and smell like.
Then we started working on how the packaging would look. We knew we wanted to use dark coloured glass because it is so safe and stable and it also enables us to make small batches which we hand label to ensure maximum freshness and also to create new fragrances and products on a regular basis. We worked with a designer we know very well, Micha Weidmann, who created the idea for the new evolve labels. The idea was that I could create them myself on my Mac without needing a designer to artwork them every time, to save time and make it really flexible, so we chose a "typewriter" based concept which we are really happy with!
We got this finished just in time to present our products to retailers and trade customers on the 19th April at the Natural and Organic Products Show in London Excel. Everybody loved it and we were so pleased to get positive feedback about the new range. One problem we did notice though was that the labels weren't durable enough for customer use, so we spent about the next month sorting this problem out as well as starting to manufacture the products.
Each product takes about a day to manufacture and as you can imagine, making all 12 in 1 go took us a few weeks! We finally finished most of the products last week and put on the final labels. We are still finishing off the tropical blossom body polish and body butter as those are the trickiest products in the range to make. We hope to have them done by the end of next week!
We hope you like the new range and we would love comments and feedback on it, as we can still make small changes to the product and packaging. That is the beauty of making it in small batches by hand.
Enjoy!
Laura and Violaine
