Premium Beauty News - You are celebrating the fifteenth anniversary of the design agency you founded. What were the key moments of this story?
Fabrice Legros - In fifteen years, we had the opportunity to work for many prestigious brands and on a variety of projects. Our clients include Guerlain, YSL, Dior, Jean Paul Gaultier, Coty, Inter Parfums and many others. Apart from the selective sector, Studio Pi Design also works with South American and Nordic groups. It is an experience that compels us to find creative solutions which are different from the ones we use in the luxury sector.
It’s difficult among all these achievements to highlight a particular project, but let’s say that the creation of the Omnia bottle for Bulgari was a great moment, in terms of both creativity and relationship with the brand’s teams. I also like mentioning the Narciso Rodriguez Essence palette comprising a liquid fragrance a concrete and a scented foundation.
Premium Beauty News - What lessons do you draw from these experiences?
Fabrice Legros - I think the main issue at stake stands in the quality of the relationship that builds up between the designer and the teams. From this relationship will depend the quality of the creation, the words used in the brief to express the needs of the brand, and their understanding by the designer. A badly chosen word by the marketing team, or misinterpreted by the designer, can be a real pitfall. It is therefore important to communicate well to avoid such surprises.
Of course, the more the brief is complete, the more obvious the creation is. Sometimes a board is preferable, because images are a help to enter into a world while giving more freedom to imagination.
Here too the creation of the Omnia bottle for Bulgari will remain a great memory. For the first time we were given carte blanche. This forced us to review the brand’s whole DNA from scratch, and from this solid base we could leave it to our imagination. Strangely enough, this did not result in a whole lot of ideas but instead in a project that immediately won the enthusiasm of the client.
Premium Beauty News - Precisely, is it not where the talent of the designer stands: to know how to imbue himself of the spirit of a brand prior to innovating?
Fabrice Legros - I think it’s actually the gist of the profession. Many designers believe they are artists. I believe instead that this profession is very different from that of an artist.
A designer has to be at the service of a brand and of its codes, he must adjust and adapt his style to the brand. That does not mean he cannot have his own artistic sensibility, but he must be able to integrate it into the codes of the brand. That means to master the codes of Baroque when the brand requests it, and on the contrary to know how to stay minimalistic when brands require it.
To work for brands is very different from a creator’s design activity, who produces personal objects. You must be able to adapt your creative expression to the identity of your customers. And entering into a brand’s DNA is all the more important when it concerns a creator’s brand with a strong personality. I recall in particular the work achieved for the bottles of the Boudoir and Libertine lines by Vivienne Westwood.
Finally, design also requires technical expertise. Designing pretty shapes is not enough. You must also know how to use materials which are consistent with the desired shape and to know how to take into account costs constraints which are inherent in each project.
Premium Beauty News - Precisely, on this subject, what is the impact of ecological constraints in your business?
Fabrice Legros - We see some briefs emerge, who are strongly focused on their compliance with environmental specifications, requiring very often the use of recycled or recyclable materials.
But I must say it is a very complex issue for the luxury industry. Because luxury’s challenge is to constantly enchant people, and for that reason packaging plays a vital role. I believe for example that it is an area where to try and further reduce the weight of packagings can quickly become a problem on the market. This does not mean however that the luxury segment can side-step environmental constraints, but that certainly specific solutions must be found.
We can imagine, for example, that bottles remain precious objects, and that they even become more and more precious, but that people don’t throw them away anymore. This is the concept of the perfume fountain developed for the Angel perfume by Thierry Mugler. We could also go back to the original spirit of luxury perfume bottles: a collector’s item that is carefully saved. An almost similar phenomenon exists in Japan, but for different reasons. Japanese women use very little perfume but love beautiful perfume bottles they can place conspicuously on their bathroom shelves like rare decorative objects.
In any case, it’s the consumer who will trigger or not this phenomenon. Currently, marketing teams are sticking so close to the market and are so responsive that when this trend or another one suddenly emerges, brand’s response will come very rapidly.
