We started working on The Australian Wildflower Collection right before Christmas, and I first had the idea when I was driving my son to preschool!
I originally wanted to call the collection - The Australian Flora Collection - because I wanted the range to celebrate Australian florals and be really feminine and perfect for Mother's Day.
It wasn't until I got back to the candle shed, and shared the idea with Mum and we started really brainstorming ideas and different scents.
It took a couple of days, and we both had the "aha" moment at the same time (spooky when it happens). I really loved the name Paper Daisy, and she really loved the name Desert Pea, and that's about as technical as it gets, we just liked them. And we decided on a more appropriate name - The Australian Wildflower Collection.
One of our goals of this collection was to incorporate more floral based scents into our range, as we really only have two.
We normally release collections in three or fours, but we never found the third fragrance that we absolutely loved, and I don't release anything that I wouldn't enjoy in my own home. Hence why we ended up with two scents in this collection.
One thing we knew with each of the names we selected - those flowers don't have a scent. So we really needed to dig deep and rely on the power of words and feelings to create that "scentsory" experience for us.
To do this, we researched the two different flowers and what their meanings are, and we also relied on their physical appearance to determine their personalities.
This helped us to develop a brief for our perfumers to find the perfect scents to match the fragrance names.
Normally, we do this the other way round - we find the scent and then name it - so this was a challenge for us that we loved!!
As these flowers don't have a scent, we did A LOT of sampling to find the scent that did these flowers justice. I lost count of how many samples!!
To us, a Desert Pea is strong, unique and bold, so we knew the scent had to be all of those things. We blended deep notes of floral scents to create a real scentsory, evocative experience, worthy of the Desert Pea name.
A Paper Daisy is youthful, flows in the breeze and is vibrant in all of it's beautiful colours. We also knew the scent had to incorporate those personality traits, whilst really transporting you to a carefree place or time in your life.
Once we found the fragrances, we tested them with our team and family members, who gave them the tick of approval!
We worked with an artist (Holly Sanders) and our own graphic designer to bring our creative vision to life. We wanted something fun, feminine and like nothing we had done before.
We started with bold, single colour block backgrounds, and I decided half-way through that I wanted something different this time. It was actually my husband (dare I say it), who had the idea of the "bubbles" or "jelly beans" as we call them - the beautiful pops of colour in the backgrounds that has been followed through the rest of our marketing for this range.
The box designs are also an indication as to where our brand is headed this year! Stay tuned.......
