How Headless Horse reimagined TEAM DR JOSEPH’s identity and packaging for a sustainable future

Founded in 1986, TEAM DR JOSEPH is an Italian and family-run luxury cosmetics brand offering handmade, organic and sustainable products. They approached Edinburgh-based branding, design and development studio Headless Horse, looking for a new identity and packaging system that would be both sustainable and sustained. In alignment with the quality of TEAM DR JOSEPH’s formulae, the new approach would also need to articulate the family’s attention to detail and commitment to producing result-driven skincare. 

As a result, the revised packaging system features a revised wordmark and the introduction of a new insignia, as well as typographic and material updates, including a recyclable wooden cap and FSC recycled paper produced domestically in Italy.

In contrast to the direction of the old wordmark – a clean sans serif – the new wordmark and insignia aim to communicate the legacy and heritage of the brand. “The wordmark previously had a slogan beneath it, which we excluded to make the wordmark recognisable and to give a cleaner, concise appearance to an already long wordmark,” they say. “We implemented a new system for the packaging’s black bar, so we scaled the logo proportionally to this new system. A nice touch is that the glyphs for the 'T,’ ‘R’ and ‘J’ align to form a larger ‘J’ in the insignia, implying that the brand was once just Erb. Dipl. Dr Joseph Franz before expanding to the team that it is today.” 

The company’s expansion into other markets necessitated adding more copy to the boxes – such as translations into other languages – in addition to scaling certain features in accordance with different regional packaging requirements. This led to the introduction of Dinamo’s Monument Grotesk Semi-Mono as the secondary typeface, paired with Akkurat Bold – which was already used as part of the wordmark and primary headings. “We chose this to convey the company's more technical, scientific efficacy while also balancing out the identity and communicating the company’s duality with its more natural branding and imagery (we also love monospace typefaces),” they explain. “The typeface is legible at smaller sizes on the packaging and website, and the semi-mono typeface provided some flexibility on layouts where we used justified text. We don’t like justifying monospace typefaces, so we went with the semi-mono, which is more forgiving of being justified.” 

Since 1986, during his research, Founder Erb. Dipl. Dr Joseph Franz collected flower presses from the laboratories’ garden in a library called the Herbarium. “A detail we are incredibly proud of is the culmination of many hours of research and development to create the new flower detail on the box,” they reveal. “We have taken scans of the flowers and created 1:1 embossings of these, pressing them into the packaging for a tactile finish and meeting the objective of eliminating coloured inks from the product packaging,” they conclude.  

Headless Horse

TEAM DR JOSEPH