Van Heertum Design VHD created the brand and bottle design for luxury brand Enigma, in collaboration with the international Make a Mark initiative.

Make a Mark is an exclusive design innovation project developed by global industry leaders: Leonhard KURZ, ESTAL and Avery Dennison. The project aims to explore packaging innovation, sustainability, and luxury, and how to reconcile the three. The world’s top packaging design agencies are invited to take part in this inspirational project, and they are asked to create a packaging design without any limitations. So complete creative freedom, after which the designs are really produced to push the boundaries in production. The design was revealed in Monaco at the Luxepack this week.

We wanted to create something impressive and challenge all the boundaries. From scratch we went crazy and moved into many different directions. We decided to focus on heavy contrasts that combine different shapes into a perfect blend.

We love materials, so here we also wanted to explore the extremes. In this phase, everything is possible and we have no filter. Sketching geometric predictable shapes against organic shapes that do unpredictable things.

Since we work with glass we tried to predict how the light will find its way and makes it an interesting object. We created something mysterious and impossible to understand, our Enigma was born.

In the bottom part we have the pyramid shaped iceberg, a mystical shape that is used in different cultures and symbolizes reaching for the stars. This shape has the ability to refract white light, from red to violet. The diversity of colours creates a bridge between the land and the sky. A rainbow that in many cultures symbolises hope, is the perfect mythical playground for our unicorn. This is where the horn upper began to take shape. This organic shape symbolises our own fantasy and connect it back to earth by piercing it into the icy pyramid.

To create a model without boundaries, we didn’t want to be limited in what a computer could offers us. We decided to craft it by hand and digitalize it later, we started by calculating the dimensions. We chose 700ml as inner measurement for the bottle and created the outside from there.

With a wood lathe we made a precise wooden cone. A sliced and sanded pyramid made of foam and a laser-cut top were the elements that formed our base. After putting the parts together, we sculpted a horn shaped texture by clay. When finished, a 3d scanner captured our bottle into a point cloud. Together with the technical drawing, the captured file is modelled into a workable file.

For the label we chose a Velvet Indigo, from Avery Dennison, giving it a soft feel, like the unicorn would feel, in contrast to the hard glass horn, created by Estal. We did not print with ink on the label but chose 6 different hot foils, from KURZ, to foil the labels, which was a big challenge that could not have been done without the help of Reynders Label Printing, our printing partner in this project.

The road we took was not always the most obvious, we looked for boundaries and crossed them, symbolizing Enigma.