Motions Salon Care Products Become Weightless With New Bottle Strategy

New shapes and multilingual text are allowing Motions hair care products to transfer their market lead into mass retail outlets and beyond.

Motions is the largest selling brand of professional ethnic salon hair care products. In moving to more "at home" products available at more retail outlets, the brand is moving to original and proprietary structural package designs for the first time.

The new products, part of the "Motions at Home Salon Care" line intended for daily use between salon visits, include three new "Weightless" products. All three products are 100% oil-free and minimize dryness and breakage with essential moisturizers that won't build up or look greasy.

The Motions brand felt the pressure of the large general market consumer hair care brands, some of which were trying to make inroads into Motions' strong ethnic consumer franchise. So the brand decided it was time to evolve from their strongly identified yellow and purple stock bottles and create new bottles that would stand out in mass market retail and drug stores.

New formulas need new looks

Motions chemists had come up with breakthrough formulations for the new Motions Weightless product concept, and the plan was to capitalize on it as quickly as possible. Spark Inc., the Chicago design firm that oversees much of the Motion brand's look at retail, was commissioned to come up with some original structural designs for the first time—and fast.

The brand owners, Alberto Culver Company in Melrose Park, IL, wanted the new packaging to be ready for shipping in just 120 days. In addition, the new structural packaging had to be able to be filled at high speeds on a number of very different Alberto Culver production lines across the country.

"For this new structural design, it was very important to have the ability to be filled in a number of facilities," says Spark principal Ron Farnum. "We had to line up the top and bottom so that it could go down the lines very quickly without problems. The widest part lines up with the bottom, which is a 'design thing' that allows for top fill speeds on a number of different lines around the country."

Identifiable and extendable

The 75 SKUs of Motions products have been highly identifiable and highly valued in the salon environment for many years. "Our biggest challenge is strengthening the overall brand presence while adding more and more SKUs," says Farnum. The proprietary shape of the curved bottles was partly guided by the limitations of time in another way—a stock cap was chosen as there was no time to design and source both a new bottle and a new cap.

As marketing becomes more and more world-conscious, the Motions brand has also gone multilingual with all their packaging. The new bottles follow suit, and will soon be showing up on shelves throughout the world. The eager acceptance and highly positive reaction to the new structural designs quickly led the Motions marketing team to promote two more SKUs into the new bottle shapes. This promotion also ups these two SKUs from 6-oz. to 13-oz. bottles, providing the products to the consumer at a significantly lower cost per ounce.