Popular lubricant WD-40 has been around for over 50 years and is used on everything from automobiles to bicycles. Well, the industrial company has come out with a brand new division called WD-40 Bike. Different from the original lubricant, WD-40 Bike products are specially made for bikes with several washes, lubricants and frame protectors. In addition to creating some new packaging for this brand extension, they have also created an excellent marketing campaign where they travel to various bike races to promote their products.

To create the packaging, WD-40 partnered with Anthem Branding advertising and design agency. Each product is manufactured in a grey plastic bottle with yellow spray nozzle or cap. The color pallet for this new line is similar in design to the original but uses grey, yellow and blue instead of red, blue and yellow. Bottles are finished with either a wrap around or front and back labels. To help distinguish between the different products, detailed hand drawn bike illustrations are used on the bottom portion of the labels. The product variety name is also color coded for purchasing ease such as blue for the “foaming wash” and orange for the “heavy-duty degreaser.”

Check out another cleaning product with some awesome packaging in our previous blog, “From Bottle to Pouch.”

This weekend, while visiting a friend’s house, I came across an intriguing product. What I originally thought was a perfume, turned out to be an odor eliminating spray with quite an interesting name. The product, called Poo-Pourri, is different from a room spray or disinfectant spray as it is meant to be sprayed in the toilet bowl prior to use to prevent odor. In fact, the company uses the catchy phrase in marketing, “spritz the bowl before you go and no one else will ever know!”

Besides the cleverness of the odor eliminating product, what really caught my eye were the labels and packaging. Poo-Pourri has 8 product collections including original, women/men’s, unisex, kids, gifts, organic and travel. My favorite products are the “original scent,” “No. 2” and “Call of the Wild.” Check out the three product pictures above and notice how each bottle is finished with a beautifully designed label. I love the elegance of the label art especially with the Victorian looking details and chic font selections. Another thing I love about the bottles is that most of them come with a charm wrapped gently around the bottle’s neck for some excellent value packaging! Value packaging is something that consumers are looking for, now more than ever in a struggling economy, as added incentives to purchase a product.

For more information on this genius odor eliminating product, check out their website!

There was a time when laundry detergent companies, such as Downy, only packaged their fabric softeners in the traditional plastic container finished with a front and back label. However, within this past year, Downy introduced several new product lines with shrink sleeve packaging.

Check out the shrink sleeve packaging used for two of the company’s newest product lines. The top left container is a sample from their “Simple Pleasures” line which contains five products utilizing shrink. Notice the unique shape of the bottle and how the purple shrink sleeve is able to highlight the interesting curved shape of the neck. Shrink sleeves are particularly useful for unusually shaped bottles. For more information on shrink sleeves, click here! Downy also recently added another new product to their collection called the “Unstopables In-wash Scent Boosters” meant to increase the scent of your clothes post-wash. The two oddly shaped product containers in this line utilize shrink sleeves to fit the unusual shape and features a show through design that we blogged about in the past.

What other laundry detergents or products have you noticed adding shrink sleeve technology to their product packaging lately?

Remember our past blogs about the Method laundry detergent packaging and dish soap makeover? Well the innovative household cleaning product company has wowed us again with pouched packaging to complement both of these pre-existing products. The stand up pouches are refill products for their already existing detergents & soaps and were introduced late last year.

The photograph above displays the pouches next to their traditional plastic containers. Notice that each of the flexible pouches are printed with a high quality graphic of the traditional hard plastic container. Lisa McTigue Pierce of Packaging Digest comments, “The graphics for Method’s new refill pouch make it intuitive for consumers to match the refill with its rigid counterpart.” The pouches have a built in nozzle for easy dispensing and a built in handle on the right side of the pouch for easy lifting. Did you know that Dion Label Printing has the capabilities to print pouches such as the ones used for the refill products above? Check out our Pouches page for more information.

Check out another household cleaning product that turned to a pouch for their refill products in our Pouched Refills Reduce Packaging blog!