Introduction
Gifting has been an enormous part of Humankind. People often buy from Humankind to gift to their husbands, moms, grandmas, co-workers and everyone in between. As a business, offering gift wrap was heavy lift - you have to design the bags, the bows, the colours, and you also have to find a for each bag to fit into the shipping box. If it's not a gift bag, it's usually paper wrap, which people throw away or re-use. Logistically gift wrap, for a small business, is a bit of a nightmare.
My biggest gripe with traditional gift wrap is that it's not beautiful enough to display, so people (including me) keep a bag of gift wrap, ribbons, old bags in my closet to re-use at a later time. Occasionally people re-use nice bags, from Tiffany, Louis Vuitton, or Hermes, and it allows them to "peacock", says one of my customers.
Another one of my customers shared the Japanese concept of "furoshiki", traditional Japanese square wrapping cloths made of fabric, used for carrying or presenting gifts, transporting goods, and as decorative item. Similarly, another friend suggested Korean Bojagi, an ancient Korean art of creating patchwork wrapping cloths, which are traditionally made by hand-stitching fabric scraps together to make beautiful, lightweight, and reversible cloths for wrapping gifts and household items.
I was stuck with a question: how can I make gift wrap that reduced my logistics, increased customer delight, made it such that customers wanted to use it again, and also enabled them to peacock?
Designing the Scarf
First, I wrote a creative brief, which included the relevant natural motifs. These motifs occur in this upcoming fall/winter collection of candles, such as cloves, pine, and trees and grass. I also loved rabbits, since they're my zodiac animal. I imagine building Humankind as one long, continuous dance, or meditation. Many of my customers also have mentioned that my candles are safe around their birds, dogs, and other pets. And of course I had to show the dual layers.
Onto my journey I went. I found an artist on Behance, Paulina Varregn, who had designed beautiful textiles. The turnaround was quick, and she also included multiple sketches which I loved. Here were the three concepts:
Manufacturing the Scarf
While I waited for Paulina to create the design, I reached out to a whole lot of manufacturers to get quotes. There are so many different kinds of textiles! Mulberry silk, regular silk, cotton, tencel, satin blends, cotton satin blends, and so many different weaves and textures.
The most favoured option my customers asked for was silk, so I went with that. I also had to consider the performance of the fabric - would it be easy to wear? Would the design print well on the fabric? Would it look beautiful? Can it be biodegradable? Would it snag? Can both men and women wear it? Ultimately I was able to answer all of these questions, and a month later, receive the beautiful wrap. Here it is:
Closing
If you've made it this far, thank you very much for reading. You can read more about the technical specs on the product page for this Collector's Edition Gift Wrap.