Leisure Time’s sales rise 17% with packaging inspired by HBA products. The bottles’ ‘softer’ look and texture deliver the ‘ahh’ moment that pampered luxury homeowners crave.
Sales of the Leisure Time brand of spa and hot-tub water care products were exceeding the category’s annual sales increases of 3 to 5%. Consumers viewed the premium-priced products as high quality.
Yet the brand’s owner, Atlanta-based Advantis Technologies, made a bold move by redesigning the packaging. The company believes its new packaging communicates a more sophisticated message about the product quality to well-to-do consumers.
The redesign has produced several results:
• The packaging helps to deliver the brand’s magic “ahh” moment, both visually and through surface texture, which spa owners—who are used to enjoying the finer things in life—expect.
• Sales have risen 17%, and distribution has increased at spa dealers.
• The line is “displacing” some competitors’ brands from some dealers’ store shelves and retaining Leisure Time’s position as the category sales leader.
The foundation for the new packaging was built after Advantis, working with Object 9, conducted a brand and category audit. Michael Moore, Advantis Vice President of Marketing, gives this reason behind the research: “Leisure Time has arguably been the best-selling and most effective water-care product line on the market for over 25 years, but our packaging had become somewhat disconnected from the brand’s core attributes.” Elegance, cleanliness, and luxury, he adds, are these core attributes.
Yet the old packaging—which included a stock bottle and stock fonts—presented a less-than-premium brand, unappealing to consumers willing to spend $15,000 on a spa. Object 9 Partner Jon Cato says the brand’s core consumers—primarily women—viewed Leisure Time as conservative with dated and industrial-looking packaging.
Advantis updated everything about the brand except for the product formula. With inspiration from health and beauty product packaging, Object 9 and materials suppliers developed a proprietary bottle with a “swoosh” pattern embossed near the rounded shoulder.
The blow-molded bottles are screen-printed using a custom metallic, pearlescent, platinum ink. When exposed to light, the bottle texture resembles bubbles and reinforces the brand’s cleanliness attribute, Cato says.
The swoosh repeats as part of the “water drop” logo. The drop appears just above the bottle’s center. The brand name appears in larger letters using custom fonts. The product variety appears below the brand name in an oval in a color that matches the cap.
Wider cap sizes give the bottle a “bullet” shape and complete what Cato describes as a “softer design.”
By Jim George, Editor-in-Chief
