Hunter Luxury has used the elegance of our natural world as the inspiration for its newly expanded range of exquisite fragrance cases – the Alvari Collection.
The full-service luxury packaging expert meticulously designed every detail of the range, which first launched in 2023, as one of its Inspirations collections. Each product in the collection is themed around honeybees, creating an engaging sensory experience that can be used to elevate discovery sets, gift sets, and luxury retail sets.
The range combines a variety of materials and processes to showcase Hunter Luxury’s unmatched design capabilities, making use of unique structural designs and meticulous attention to detail to provide an immersive, curated brand narrative for end users to explore, offering new possibilities for both high end and entry level applications.
Bee inspired
At Hunter Luxury, we’re passionate about what we do, and so our team of experts always put a little of themselves into every project, often in the form of a unique finish or design flourish that carries the fingerprint of the designer. With the Alvari Collection, this went one step further. The range was the brainchild of Mandy, our Product Inspiration Manager. In her spare time, Mandy is an avid beekeeper, and she channelled this passion into the striking honeybee motif at the core of the Alvari collection. Even the name – ‘Alvari’ – is derived from the Latin word for ‘beehive’.
It proved to be the perfect fit. When it comes to fragrances, few can match the expertise of the honeybee. Nature’s hardest workers can find their way to the sweetest floral fragrances from miles away, using nothing but their memories of a particular scent. And, of course, bees are natural structural designers, constructing intricate hives out of nothing more than plant fibres.
As a result, Mandy’s honeybees made the perfect ambassadors for our range of elevated fragrance packaging. “When you think of bees, thoughts of verdant summer meadows and colourful flower gardens are never far behind,” she explains. “This theme gave our design team the freedom to demonstrate our full range of capabilities, from complex structural designs to elaborate finishing and bespoke detailing.
“Fragrance packaging, more than any other, must capture the soul of the product. It has to transport you to another world – that can only be achieved through the right combination of materials, processes, and technical details, which all come together to serve a creative vision.”
Milk and honey
Each pack appeals to the senses of sight and touch to elevate the rigid carton board designs. The range is covered in vegan polyurethane leather and lined on the inside with printed organic cotton, creating a luxurious blend of soft-touch sensations for users to explore as they open the pack. This softness is complemented by the contrasting use of hard metal details like the gold bee charm that covers the magnetic closure.
The vegan leather exterior lining makes use of embossing to create a textured honeycomb pattern, with select honeycomb cells picked out in golden hot stamp foiling to add a touch of visual depth to the otherwise pure white leather. The white and gold finish evokes milk and honey – a combination that has been the epitome of luxury for thousands of years.
Soft-touch sensations
Inside, the cotton lining of each pack is printed with colourful line drawings of floral designs, picked out in extraordinary detail by our advanced printing technology. However, the interior is only part of the overall experience. The key for our designers is to ensure the visual and structural design elements complement one another to enhance a brand’s story and take the consumer on an emotional sensory journey when unboxing the product.
The first product developed for the Alvari Collection, the ‘Four Seasons’ folding box, crystallises this approach. Made of six connected triangular segments, each one containing a small discovery-size fragrance bottle, the pack sits in a hexagonal shape – just like a honeycomb. Each segment unfolds, revealing gold foil printed bee patterns and floral designs in four colours to symbolise the four seasons, with each fragrance held in an individual glorifier.
Bringing a brand to life
Combining elements to create a satisfying structural transition – the way a pack moves from open to closed and back again – is at the heart of what we do at Hunter Luxury. It is central to the way a product is framed and displayed at the point of sale and in the home. The transition enables the designer to guide the consumer through the gradual reveal of internal graphics and other visual elements. This can bring a brand’s story to life, and in this case, a nod to our commitment to a range of sustainable causes.
“Part of beekeeping involves the protection of local pollinator populations,” explains Mandy. “This is a cause that is dear to our hearts at Hunter Luxury, but it also links perfectly into a fragrance brand’s narrative.”
The transitional nature of these packs poses some technical challenges. The folding boxes made use of three living hinges, creating the required level of flexibility that facilitates a smooth unfolding experience. These hinges were carefully engineered to achieve the level of durability we required, meaning their performance does not degrade even after repeated, prolonged use. This level of longevity reinforces the supplementary purpose of many luxury packs, which is to act as a keepsake.
Pushing the boundaries of possibility with new additions
The newly expanded range pushes the idea of creating a showstopping transition even further, incorporating 3D and pop-up elements to create fragrance sample packs that are simply unforgettable.
The range displays a variety of techniques that can be used to turn ordinary sampler packaging into an extraordinary experience. It includes 3D pop-up representations of the full fragrance bottle, sliding drawer packs, and apertures that frame the fragrance bottle in a tangle of wildflowers.
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