I had the wonderful opportunity of meeting the Creative Director and the Chief Marketing Officer of Rituals Cosmetics when they came to visit us from Amsterdam Head Office. Both the CD and the CMO were very friendly and passionate about their roles and it inspired me to pursue a passion project of my own. In order to feed the creativity monster, and to practice my design while I was working in a different job role, I decided to use my free time during the year to pursue a case study of Rituals products, and then use what I'd learned to try and design my own. Considering my job role in the retail store location, I had a unique and important research perspective when it came to the effect of certain designs and visuals, as well as what kinds of products customers responded to well.
In the short term, this project would exercise and train my design abilities and give me something to focus on for the coming months leading up to the start of my masters program. In the long term, I want to be able to revisit this project as I learn new design skills, and I want to be able to come back to this study after my masters to apply the marketing skills I will have learned to experience each moving part of what it takes to design a Rituals collection.
Every product Rituals makes (with fragrance) roughly follows the framework of 3 scent categories; Fresh, Rich, or Floral. Amongst the Classic, Private, and Promotion collections, the inspiration behind their ingredients and subsequent fragrances relies on a certain country or cultural event/significance. I decided to start my case study by roughly designing 3 collections; one fresh, one rich, and one floral, each of these 3 had to have some sort of culture tie and its ingredients either had to reflect that or reflect an ingredient customers asked for.
