Client
method
Category
Personal care, structural packaging
Year
2022
Scope
Industrial design, form development, CMF
Channel
Retail & DTC
Constraint
Three fixed requirements that pulled against each other. The bottle had to read as family with the existing 18 oz. It had to hold 28 oz. And it had to fit under a hard height limit on a standard retail shelf. Volume has to go somewhere, and with height capped the only directions left are ones that change the silhouette.
The harder problem was the pump. At this volume, pumps break in transit and empty product into the box, and this bottle was going to ship direct as well as sit on a shelf. The obvious answer was a stock pump from a supplier, rated and proven. But Method had never shipped a product with a stock pump, and the pump is the part a person puts their hand on every day.
Decision
The volume went sideways rather than up. Flattening the body profile solved three things at once: it kept the bottle under the shelf height, it let the bottle sit on the narrow ledge of a hybrid tub shower instead of crowding the floor, and the flat face gave the 18 oz graphic language somewhere to live at the larger size. Family resemblance and shower ergonomics turned out to be the same decision.
On the pump, both options stayed on the table and got mocked up in parallel for the length of the project rather than being decided early. What it landed on was a split. The pump engine, the mechanism that actually fails in shipping, is a stock part already rated for ecommerce. The head, the part a person touches, is custom. That kept the risk on proven hardware and the brand on the surface where it's felt, and it meant the first Method product to use a stock pump didn't look or feel like one.
Finish
HDPE bottle, polypropylene pump, both incorporating post-consumer recycled content. Scent-coded color palette.
More work
