Saje Holiday Design

overview

With 40% of sales for Saje occuring in Q4 (Nov-Jan), the holiday collection is a huge focus each year for the Creative Department. We begin in January with concepting and testing colours and print techniques and continue to iterate, refine, and perfect through the early Spring.

Every year brings it’s own set of challenges and wins, with a new theme and direction selected to convey the overall mood of the entire collection.

goal

Over my years at Saje I’ve been able to work on many different aspects of Holiday, from helping to create unique custom elements to directing the entire theme of the collection. The goal each time to create a memorable experience for the guest, transporting them to a world of memories, traditions, joy, and care while they’re interacting with the packaging and hard goods.

wellness wonderland - holiday 2020

coming out of holiday 2019 we knew that we wanted the coming year’s collection to read more “high-holiday”. We created a few directions around the theme of Wellness wonderland, and eventually landed on a bright and cheerful poppy aesthetic- full of patterns and tone-on-tone colours, with accents of gold foil.

There were many challenges that we faced; a lower budget and shorter timeframe being driving factors… and then a pandemic on top! This meant less samples/sampling time, logistical issues, and multiple vendor closures. We focused on what we knew we could do well, and omitted the fluff. we used dielines that we knew would work and doubled down on the materials that performed well- RPET, washable kraft, and ceramics.

Overall, it was a triumph that I am still so proud of. We pulled off a massive multi-country sku run on the smallest holiday budget in years, with a streamlined team adjusting to WFH. The collection dropped in stores November 1st and added a bright pop of colour that was distinctly holiday. It sold extremely well, and was agile enough to allow any slob items to roll over seamlessly to the following holiday, or sit in stores if needed.

all the feels - holiday 2018

this was the first holiday collection that I had a hand in co-art directing and was such a fun challenge to build out. our overall theme was that of Holiday being a feeling, and from this we built out an evocative collection that spoke to the reason behind gifting, with a minimalist and thoughtful approach.

we were asked to keep the successful merlot colour from the previous year, but to continue to evolve it. we landed on an analogous colour theme that used organic blocks of colours that created tonality and depth on the shelves, while also allowing for a higher shopability and merchandising opportunities. I drew a suite of a wabi-sabi botanicals that we layered in gold foil on boxes as well as custom calligraphic elements that spoke to the “feels” in the collection.

with sustainability moving to the forefront of thought within the packaging department, we strategized about how to minimize our footprint, while also creating a covetable collection. in partnering with our vendors we were able to move more skus towards soy ink, recycled paper, and glue-less dielines. For the larger/heavier items we opted to provide “ready wrapped”, wherein the package has no branding on it, simply the wrapping paper-esque design. A double-sided tag ensures all necessary information is present on shelves, and the tag could be reversed by the customer and used as a gift tag once at home.

gratitude can travel any distance - holiday 2017

I created custom calligraphy for this collection in the form of a pattern that was applied to the packages and tissue paper. Spot calligraphy was also created for certain products, as well as the marketing photoshoot tags, envelopes, and props.

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