Top Shelf Brands

Rew's Bath Time was an internal brand that Top Shelf Brands launched during my time there. We wanted to launch a series of gentle bubble baths with scents and benefits themed around each of the owners' kids. It was our mission to create a safe bath product that turned the typically herculean task of getting your kids into the bath into a positive, memorable experience. I was given creative lead on the project launch, working with a talented team consisting of designers, a photographer, and a copywriter.

Our primary focus being to create something parents and kids could trust, we felt it would be worth considering a mascot. Really, this turned into four mascots for each of the scents and the kids they were based on. Beyond the more obvious choices of bubbly letters and pastel color palettes, this really helped the products become approachable, especially from a parent's point of view. If these products were "made" for these little characters with care, it stood to reason that they were made for their children with the same level of safety and care in mind. We developed a logo and brand around the idea of these mascots and put them in very human-like situations to avoid confusion with pet shampoo.

All of the mascots really came to life in the packaging design, where each scent was named as belonging to a particular named wolf, reinforcing that the bubble bath was made for this specific kind of wolf/child. Each bottle featured each of them at bath time, showing off their personality through their bath time routines, and reinforcing these routines as very human, relating it to the parents’ bath time routines with their kids.

We then took this idea of the wolves in human situations and applied it to the other main goal of the brand: how do we turn bath time into a pleasant place to make memories with your kids? We compared bath time to other childhood activities, and ended up talking about waterproof books to bundle with the bubble bath and incorporate story time into bath time. Designing these books was a great experience, getting to pack each page of simple storytelling with as much character as possible, and letting the wolves show off their personalities in a truly unique way.

Supplementary designed pieces included an order form/informational pamphlet, special packaging and thank you cards for influencer campaigns, and web design assets. Working on the launch of Rew’s Bath time was an interesting combination of ordinary brand launch design like logo design, brand style guide, etc., as well as unique items like immediate packaging design systems, helping with photoshoots, and conceptualizing specialized packaging for influencer campaigns.

Top Shelf Brands’ most common type of design project was enhancing various Amazon pages of the brands we represented. Adding our clients’ branding to the ordinarily Amazon-branded spaces was a huge deal. The two main ways that we did this was with Amazon Storefront pages and Enhanced Brand Content (EBC)/A+ Content.

Storefronts are essentially a brand’s profile on Amazon. If you view a product and click on the name of the brand selling it, you’re taken to their storefront. Here, Amazon gives a variety of widget types and sizes to customize your storefront. Working within these parameters made branding these Storefronts an interesting challenge, as did the ability to add pages and subpages to the storefront in a website format. Having a branded web-like experience integrated into Amazon was something that our clients didn’t often know they could have, and was usually a very easy sell because of the value.

EBC/A+ Content, on the other hand, was information placed on an individual item being sold. Similar to Storefronts, Amazon would give you various widgets to customize, which we would typically use to detail the specific product being sold. How it compares to other products the brand sells, specific details on ingredients, how-to-use guides, and more were right at home in EBC/A+.