What do women want?
A question most men can’t answer and most women have not answered. This was exactly how our rebranding process started in January.
Being a woman, and having had these conversations with other women, we want something that is simple. We want to be heard, we want to be liberated, want to be seen as equals in our own strengths and capacity. We want simple solutions for complex problems we face everyday, especially in terms of our health.
With this insight, we re-looked at &ME, as a brand. With brainstorming sessions with the team, we asked ourselves basic questions like—
What does the brand communicate? What does it believe in? Who is the brand’s target audience? What are women asking for? etc. We collected data from our women consumers, understood their needs, their preferences and put in our own experiences to bring answers to these questions.
One of the major things we noticed was the way women read our brand name— Me. And the way it was searched on different platforms, & Me, and me, Me drink. This brought us to our first problem to solve, the logo and name.
While women love the name, the legibility in the logo was becoming a problem. We asked ourselves, do we need this change? Will people adapt to this? Will this affect our consumer? Will it make them think that this is a new brand and will we have to rework on gaining that trust?
All questions were answered one by one when we started working on the logo design. I remember a friend had asked me a couple years ago about how I felt toward this logo and I had a million reasons to change it. And I did.
Why did we rework on our logo identity?
To answer this: we had to make it simple. Simplification was the only way out. As Ankur would say, “we took and me out of the heart” of course in a very positive way. We made variations of all sorts and even considered removing the iconic conversational heart, but I couldn’t have gotten rid of something so true and so symbolic to the brand. It would be a crime.
We kicked off the design process by selecting a new typeface for the brand— Rubik. We fixated on this for its elegance, simplicity and versatility. I believe this font represents the bold, delicate and gracefulness of a woman as she matures with age. It represents different stages of a woman—from puberty to menopause and beyond.
Next we did was changed the way the brand name was read:
&Me >>>andMe
Lower case has been chosen to make the brand more approachable. ‘M’ is capital to emphasis on self care. To simplify it further, we took a minimal and clean approach on the identity.
After multiple iterations, we were fixated on a logo option with the heart just placed next to the name andMe. We chose a cool gray to symbolise neutrality and balance.
We also decided to add our tagline, Simplifying women’s health. The only meaning behind this tagline is—that’s what we do. We want to make everything simple for women so that while we focus on them, they can focus on their dreams and goals.
Is this where we stopped though? NO! Changing the logo identity was not enough as this only answered 20% of what women want.
Asking a few experts and some more consumers, cohesiveness in visual communication and branding seemed to be missing.
What was our next step?
We had to address multiple concerns of women. Although our range addresses every concern a women goes through from puberty to menopause, they still seemed to be lost in this pool. We decided to categorise our products to make it a simple search for women when they land on our website. They have the option to shop by concern making it easier to identify the problem and address it with the right product.
We created categories with the existing range of products.
- Hormonal Care, a category that solely focuses on hormone related concerns like Thyroid, PCOS, Menopause, etc.
- Period Care, category that solves all your puberty-young-woman hood concerns like your first period, period cramps, mood swings, and cravings.
- Vaginal Care is a category that focuses on everything that happens ‘down there’. Unique products are made for concerns like UTI, Vaginal infection, Bacterial infection and much more.
- Wellness as a category overlooks an entire range of fast-selling products like Plant based protein, whole food supplements for calcium, iron, omega and many more.
- Beauty Care focuses on your inner beauty that gets reflected on the outside. With products like plant based Collagen and Biotin with goodness of Ayurveda and science has shown tremendous results on our women consumers.
We colour coded each category for our audience to connect and easily recognise on our website and packaging.
A packaging decides how your audience will perceive your brand. A simple example is when Frooti changed it’s packaging, it saw a drop in sales because the target audience was intimidated by a Rs. 10 pack, considering it to have changed prices, when it had remained the same. Similarly, packaging design for andMe was a tough nut to crack.
How does one show empathy, care, medicinal and ayurvedic, all in one packaging label design?
We went back to what our andMe women loved about us— the fact that we give out information and educate them. Unlike many packaging labels (I am guilty of reading the backside of every label as a past-time activity), our boxes and jars have always had a story to tell. It was designed to educate women about the problems they were facing.
Our very first packaging was Vaginal Care’s Probiotic + Prebiotic iced tea box. It was simple. At the very first instinct I knew I wanted something linear, simple and illustrative that tells me a story. Surrounding myself with good design from all over the world, one thing that I have noticed is people around are focusing on the story aspect to sell their brand. Through varied illustrations, typography or simple photography, it is always in a story.
We created a story of our muse— a mother with two daughters. The younger one had entered puberty. She was still exploring the changes in her body. The older one is way past that. She is now a woman, taking on the world. She faces day-to-day stress, excitement, faces hormonal changes affected by external factors such as her lifestyle. She is exploring womanhood with young blood. And then there is the mother of these two beautiful women. She has seen it all— puberty, youth, motherhood. She has her own set of bodily problems to deal with like menopause, joints getting weaker, energy levels decreasing, etc.
We’ve created a world where women who relate to our muse find an escape. Our goal of focusing on their health is for them to rely on us so that they can focus on themselves. They can focus on their dreams and goals. So we created a world where their dreams have come true.
Simple pleasures of life depicted through different activities bringing out various emotions— empathy and care, have been illustrated on the packaging. For example, our Probiotic box was our first box but every element was thought through. The farm land depict serenity, peace of mind and calm. The girl in the front is always doing an activity that she dreamt of. In this case, we chose a girl reading and relaxing instead of having to worry about vaginal infection. It is assumed that the product is already doing its magic and soothing the irritation and pain which lets her focus on things she would rather do. The girl in the back is us. We are constantly brewing solutions with Ayurveda and science and always have our women’s back!
Monotone was used to declutter and keep it as simple as possible and iconic to its category. Bold typography juxtaposed with icons to represent the problems each product focuses on or the key ingredient it contains, brings out the transparency of our clean-labelled products.
Our left and right side of boxes focus on a strong story to educate women about the problem. In this case, we have highlighted the different kind of discharges a woman can identify and be more mindful about it. We’ve also highlighted alternative solutions and reasons behind the discharge. The other side of the box highlights the benefits of key ingredients for women to know what are they consuming and why they should be consuming it.
We’ve tried to make every step of our rebranding simple, keeping our women in mind. Right from QR code leading to our app to providing information a lot of players in the market fail to give out, all of it is covered.
Our sole intent was to create an experience through functionality of the product. Each and every communication only focuses and answers what women want. Each day, we ask ourselves this question, each time we design a creative or research on a product, this question is always the first one to be answered.
We believe simplicity is the key. Plant-based, clean and sustainable solutions for women is the way to lead a healthier and happier life.
