The sustainable baby care category has spent years communicating its values through the same visual shorthand – earth tones, natural textures, and the quiet palette of making the sustainable choice. The result is a category where almost every brand looks like a variation of the same idea, and the consumer has learned to stop noticing.
Mo & Marine, a new sustainable baby wipe brand developed with London agency Greatergood® Brands, approached the brief from a completely different starting point. Rather than asking how to look sustainable, the team asked a more uncomfortable question: where do baby wipes actually go?
A household with a newborn goes through up to ten packs of baby wipes a month. Most of those wipes end up in landfill, enter drainage systems after being flushed, are swept into rivers through storm overflows during heavy rainfall, or release airborne pollutants as they degrade and incinerate. Three destinations – land, seas and oceans, and air – became the three visual territories the brand inhabits.
The illustration world that emerged is warm, generous, and completely distinctive in the category. Coral reefs and seaweed forms reference the ocean. Botanicals and stacked stones ground the identity in the land. A clean white bird in open sky references the air. Rendered in a palette anchored by a confident mid-shade blue – marine without being obvious, challenger without being cold – the system looks nothing like anything currently in the baby care aisle.
The wordmark is playful and stacked, with an ampersand at its centre that carries multiple readings simultaneously: a swirl of seaweed, a floral form, and the silhouette of a pregnant mother and child. The strapline, Little Bums Big Ambitions, does what the best straplines always do: says something genuinely true about the product, the consumer, and the brand’s ambition in the same breath.
Mo & Marine launched to immediate award recognition for both product quality and packaging design. “Our packaging design is one of the first things every customer, buyer or partner comments on,” says founder Katie.