Yesterday, a bit longer into the night than actually expected, I “finished” the fir cone illustration. While doing so and putting thousands of little lines on the screen, I thought about the tasks of today. Today sees me putting Une Rose Vermeille into flacons. I am in a sense looking forward to it, as it will allow me to continue thinking about a few of ideas we have these days. It is a meditative task, and, as long as the bottles don’t break or fall other other scented disasters happen, a calming down, easy going job.

Talking about filling flacons: There was a question the other day, raised in Basenotes, about the filling height and the void space that seem quite a large volume when you get a brand new bottle of a scent in a blue flacon. Thus, some flacons seem actually more filled than others. I tried to provide an answer. You find it here, at the bottom of the thread: In a nutshell…. It has to do with the production process of the bottles themselves. They are hand made (semi- automatic). The nominal volume of the flacon is actually close to 60 ml. I add 53 ml (+/- 1 ml). Thus, there will remain a void volume of around 7 ml which might seem like a lot. Not every flacon has the same empty volume due to the manual production process. Thus, there will be variations from one filled flacon to the other.

OK, having said this: I will actually continue thinking about packaging in the factory, while filling flacons. This upcoming Friday, when I will sit together with my designer, we will need to put a few bricks into the packaging wall. Decisions ahead. So far, we have decided that the metal tin box will be replaced early 2013, transforming our packing from pentagonal to a more standard sized rectangular tin box, with a sliding mechanism, like you know it from the discovery set. Now we are thinking about the cardboard/Paper that needs to wrap the metal tin box. I have some ideas there: I want the metal box to partly be visible, showing core elements of the brand visual and material world, such as the tin, the tauer logo and the pentagon. I guess on Friday we will see whether this will all be possible.

I did a little sketch on how I see the cardboard wrapping on my digital sketching display, and I think my designer and me work on exactly the same wave length. There are of course more challenges than just coming up with the shape and style of what wraps the tin box. Other challenges are the individualization, the coding  of the packaging for each fragrance. And yes, I got myself a cintiq the other day for my sketching and painting. I decided it was x-mas somewhere in the universe and time to pamper myself with a new super gadget.