Babylife, Olssøn Barbieri

Babylife

Motherhood, according to conventional wisdom is fulfilling a woman’s destiny, it’s a natural instinct and it accomplishes the social responsibility to create a family.

Women’s identities as mothers and wives is a construct of the last century. While feminism and working mothers contributed to reshape and evolve this idea, the need to radically explore and expand the narratives around motherhood is an urgency of our time. Babylife’s goal is to empower women and support them through the challenging, as much as rewarding, time connected with motherhood, creating a community and a range of products for the care of mother and child.

Year

2017

Deliverables

Art Direction, Packaging, Branding, Custom bottle

Industries

Beauty

Materials

Aluminium, Uncoated paper, Polypropylene

Techniques

Silkscreening, Injection molding, Offset printing

Client

Babylife (Norway)

Collaborators

Gina Rose, Design

Mathias Hansson, Cad developement

Anne Valeur, Photography

Awards

2018, Visuelt Diploma (Packaging)

“On the one hand, the joy of children. On the other hand, the misery of them. On the one hand, the freedom of not having children. On the other hand, the loss of never having had them—but what is there to lose? The love, the child, and all those motherly feelings that the mothers speak about in such an enticing way, as though a child is something to have, not something to do. The doing is what seems hard. The having seems marvellous.” Sheila Heti, Motherhood.

We live in a time that put pressure to reassess and explore the notion of femininity, how motherhood is not about being perfect. As the family structure has changed and women are back at home after 1-2 days after giving birth, many women are experiencing a sense of isolation, often followed by anxieties provoked by society and self-imposed expectations.

Babylife aims to offer a range of skincare and health products for the well-being of mother and child. In addition they have created a support system through the Babylife Clinic, where they provide pregnant women and new mothers free advice and guidance from experienced midwives.The branding bridges beauty and pharmaceutical cues, allowing for a smooth transition from the brands that women commonly use before their pregnancy. At home, the containers can be left out and not hidden away. To make it easy to embrace the brand we valued simplicity, reflecting the purity of the products with an identity that reduces noise and cultivates trust through its subtle and refined details.

Motherhood

The cult of motherhood developed in the late eighteenth-century when anatomists broke with the "one-sex" view that had dominated the study of anatomy, demonstrating the differences between women and men. The health advantages of mothers’ milk and maternal care become an idealised mission for leisured women. Motherhood became the central female identity. The turn of the century’s increased public attention to motherhood and infant care heartened feminists who had long been concerned with the needs of working mothers. The Norwegian feminist Katti Anker Møller argued that mothers should not be dependent on husbands but, single or married, should be paid by governments to raise their children independently. Furthermore, she thought without reproductive choice for women, motherhood would simply be "slavery." Women should be able to choose or reject childbearing with available contraception and abortion.
By the last decades of the twentieth century, motherhood had been transformed yet again, and mothers’ work outside the home lost much of its stigma. In the 1970s and 1980s, the growing acceptance of fathers as capable of child care further shifted what it meant to be a mother. Twentieth-century feminists attempted to move motherhood from the realm of the private and culturally invisible into the center of culture and politics. Environmental feminists define the Earth as a mother and view women as more respectful of nature because of their experiences of pregnancy and childbirth.

We focused on creating a vessel to transmit a sense of care and connection, to set the brand apart from competing products. The range needed to capture the balance between physical and emotional wellbeing while being trustworthy and becoming part of a mother’s daily routine. Functionality was also important; the products can be opened with one hand, if necessary, and the big bottleneck allows you to scoop out the last drop of the cream with your fingers.

The custom shape is a hybrid between a bottle and a tube, combining the classic silhouette of beauty products with unexpected references, like the form of a growing baby foot. The soft and rounded edges allow the child to play with it while they are cared for without any risk of hurting themselves. By standing upright on the cap, the formula is always ready to be squeezed out. Ergonomically the containers, with their oval section and organically inspired shape are nice to hold, with a soft touch and matte finish that evokes the smoothness of the skin.

Every element has been considered to balance environmental impact, manufacturing efficiency and design details optimally. The range is presented in 3 sizes (75ml, 150ml and 225ml), all using the same cap. Each product is sealed with a colour coordinated aluminium foil to preserve freshness, this allows for the bottles to be sold with separate caps making it possible to reuse them.

All products carry several certifications for ecologic content and sustainability.
The use of colours is subtle, muted pastels ranging from warming to cooling tint, reflecting the product or the ingredients, adding a sense of joy and purpose.
The use of the typeface Ideal Sans conveys a clean and rational quality while revealing gentleness — warmth, craftsmanship, and humanity. Sentinel, a slab serif, feels approachable, welcoming and persuasive.

The word “mama” is universal. While it’s true that most languages vary when it comes to the formal word mother, the intimate mama stays the same in each language. We chose to use terms of endearment such as mom, mama, mommy, and mum for the different products, to reinforce the intimacy and empathy of the brand.