HUNTER Luxury has used the elegance of the natural world as inspiration for its newly expanded range of fragrance cases – the Alvari Collection.
The luxury packaging specialist said it ‘meticulously’ designed every detail of the range, which first launched in 2023, as one of its Inspirations collections. Each product is themed around honeybees, creating a sensory experience to elevate discovery sets, gift sets, and luxury retail sets.
The range was the brainchild of Mandy, the company’s product inspiration manager, who is an avid beekeeper in her spare time. Mandy channelled this passion into the honeybee motif at the core of the Alvari collection, while the name – ‘Alvari’ – is derived from the Latin word for ‘beehive’.
“When you think of bees, thoughts of verdant summer meadows and colourful flower gardens are never far behind,” Mandy said. This theme gave our design team the freedom to demonstrate our full range of capabilities, from complex structural designs to elaborate finishing and bespoke detailing.
“Fragrance packaging, more than any other, must capture the soul of the product. It has to transport you to another world – that can only be achieved through the right combination of materials, processes, and technical details, which all come together to serve a creative vision.”
Each pack is designed to appeal to the senses of sight and touch to elevate the rigid carton board designs. The range is covered in vegan polyurethane leather and lined on the inside with printed organic cotton. This softness is complemented by the contrasting use of hard metal details like the gold bee charm that covers the magnetic closure.
The vegan leather exterior lining makes use of embossing to create a textured honeycomb pattern, with select honeycomb cells picked out in golden hot stamp foiling. The white and gold finish is said to evoke milk and honey. Inside, the cotton lining of each pack is printed with colourful line drawings of floral designs.
The first product developed for the Alvari Collection, the ‘Four Seasons’ folding box, is made of six connected triangular segments, each containing a small discovery-size fragrance bottle. The pack sits in a hexagonal shape and each segment unfolds, revealing gold foil printed bee patterns and floral designs in four colours to symbolise the four seasons, with each fragrance held in an individual glorifier.
The transitional nature of the packs posed some technical challenges. The folding boxes made use of three living hinges, creating flexibility that facilitates a ‘smooth’ unfolding experience. These hinges were engineered to achieve the level of durability required, meaning their performance does not degrade even after repeated use.
The range also includes 3D pop-up representations of the full fragrance bottle, sliding drawer packs, and apertures that frame the bottle in a tangle of wildflowers.
