When I joined SOL REPUBLIC, its product packaging at retail was very mismatched and very dark. For the first product launch in my tenure — for a small wireless speaker whose name, Punk, I pitched in the namestorming session — I worked with Character (who had worked on the most recent, most successful packages.

We designed a cohesive packaging system that stood out at retail and pushed forward the brand’s upmarket lifestyle ambitions and emotional music-lover appeal. It pairs editorial-style elegant typography and layout with heroic design-centric product views at a glance, with color tops matched to product color (the subtlety of which is sometimes hard to see clearly in renderings).

Among other goals, looking at the budgets I was working with, I worked to ensure that subsequent packaging in this system could be executed in-house without further reliance on an agency.

Prior Sol Republic packaging had eluded successful brand blocking at retail by being varied in color and layout. Also, product design and product color had been unclear from the front in many cases. The new system has a consistent and appropriate hierarchy of elements and proved the dictum that sometimes, design is subtraction.

Once a shopper picks up a headphone or speaker to review features, the backs of Sol Republic packages cover the features in icons and feature expressive and differentiating black-and-white photography. This packaging line balances the “clean, design-forward” product with the “raw, music lovers” lifestyle feel of the Sol Republic brand in social posts, point of purchase displays, ads, and social. I art directed multiple photographers in different conditions and retouched shots from prior shoots, to achieve images that balanced well with other content and with one another on the backs of packages.

Photography: Greg MacNamara

Sol Republic positioned itself as design-forward but sub-premium in terms of price (compared to, say, Beats). The out-of-box experience of the products was designed in collaboration with the industrial designer team: always refined and minimal, as high-touch as cost margins would accommodate.