A Star is Born! Festive Botanica Behind the Scenes
With Christmas just around the corner, we would love to share a bit about how are Christmas Collection 'Festive Botanica' was born. Many minds, hands & hearts combine to bring an idea to life and create an Urban Rituelle collection. It takes a village, so they say! We love our team and when we put our heads together magic happens.
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Inspo, Idea, Name
First we brainstorm ideas. We love Pinterest. It is our fave tool for gathering inspiration. Did we mention how much we love pinterest! Check out Urban Rituelle Pinterest here for your own inspiration.
Some of the things that always inspire us are; art, culture, nature, interiors, wellbeing, love and of course fragrance & the senses. Also, we are proudly Australian made so we wanted to have an Australian feel for this collection. We wanted to create a collection to celebrate the holiday season, referencing Christmas but also to make something beautiful that can be enjoyed for the whole holidays and beyond.
Festive Botanica features organic, natural ingredients & fragrances so we wanted the name to reflect this. We love the name and want to call everything 'botanica' from now on!
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Fragrance, Fragrance, Fragrance
Fragrance is the hero of our products and is something we consider super important. All of our blends are created meticulously with a lot of thought & love.
Based on our research and inspiration for Festive Botanica, we came up with a blend of Australian cypress pine, uplifting orange, revitalising eucalytpus & earthy cedarwood essential oils to bring comfort & joy to your home. Inspired by the wonderful scent of fresh-cut Christmas trees, an aroma that evokes happy memories of beautifully wrapped presents & joyful days spent celebrating with family & friends.
Once the fragrance is decided, it is formulated into each product with bespoke nourishing and moisturising ingredients put together by us. These are then tested - on us of course! Never on animals.
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Sketch, Art, Create
Now the groundwork is done, it's time to make some beautiful art and create the visual story to communicate the idea of the collection. First we begin with rough sketches to plan out how it will all fit together. All of the illustration on Festive Botanica's packaging began as hand painted watercolours. These are then digitised and the whole thing is put together to fit the design and printing process. We choose colours and create the typography. Often we work on multiple ideas which are the edited and sometimes combined to come up with the final look and feel. We always try to make our designs extra special with texture, foils, embossing & other special finishes for a luxe feel.
We like to put a lot of personality in to our designs and this has become a signature for Urban Rituelle since we began way back in 1999.
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Technical, Artwork, Words for days
Once we are happy with the design, it is time to get to the technical nitty gritty. We make up the artwork to fit the packaging. This is also the time that we write the words that appear on the packaging. This includes descriptions, warnings,ingredients, legal requirements etc. These are added to the artwork and then check and triple checked. No one wants any boo boos right?
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Samples & Photography
Oh how exciting! All the hard work is starting to pay off. Getting the pre-production samples back from the printer results in many oohs and aahs at Urban Rituelle HQ! These are then triple checked again and any technical issues and tweaks are worked on.
We have to work far ahead of our release date and timing is everything, so this is the stage that we do our first photoshoot featuring the new products. We create moodboards for our photoshoots and put together ideas for the supporting story we want to tell to really showcase our products. We then collect all of our props and then have a massive day putting it all together and shooting the pics that will then appear on our website, catalogue and social media. It's always amazing & exciting seeing the whole story come together.
For Festive Botanica the story is an Australian bush Christmas. We loosely based the look on a tablescape to represent a celebration with family and friends.
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Production, Promotion & Launch
Meanwhile production is happening! Boxes & labels are being printed. Did you know our production is actually done at our Caringbah warehouse? Candles, lip balms and Fragrance diffusers are lovingly poured and filled by our team, just to name a few.
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It's launch time! We launch first to our stockists so they can get their stores stocked up and ready for launch. We also load the new collection on our website.
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From Us to You
Finally the day has come! The products become available to you, our beloved customer. This is truly the best part of the whole process. Especially when we receive such positive reviews from the public. This is what makes all of the hard work worthwhile. Thank you for your support and we hope you enjoy our collection; Festive Botanica.