Form follows function - method Baby

The labor required

Baby and kids’ categories are hard.

Your consumer is often with you for only a few product cycles before their needs change or even disappear. As a brand, you are constantly having to recruit new consumers, and are always looking for ways to drive editorial and earned media buzz for your products. This has left these categories often bereft of interesting products and ideas, as the cost of growing a brand here is extreme and it’s hard to get momentum if your consumers keep graduating out.

Our baby formula

There were 2 main ethnographic insights that drove the design for the method baby line.

First, by watching parents wash their kiddos we noticed that it’s often a special but chaotic, squirmy time Parents need both hands free, so struggling with caps, closures and other tricky packaging was not helping. We decided to remove as many of those moments of friction as possible and created one handed and direct dispensing solutions. I designed a bottom dispensing bath toy “the otter”, that was fun for the child and easy for the parent to use one handed (a little too easy we found out, with curious parents and tots having great fun in stores making our little otter have “accidents” (sorry Target retail staff !)

Secondly I noticed that every kids bathroom had a “make do” rinsing cup for the little ones hair; usually an abandoned Tupperware or plastic container. So I designed one specifically, as part of the packaging, into the Hair & Bodywash product that also could be stored on the bottle, to keep things nice and tidy. To aid usability, I placed a finger hole in the cup, as things get slippery and it also doubles as a spout for controlled pouring.

The bottles were largely created from natural HDPE with PCR where available (to maximize recyclability) I used shrink sleeves on the more tricky forms, but as I have become more educated on the sorting and material identification issues that shrink sleeves can cause, I would be more mindful today. The Airless pump is a stock component and largely PP.