How Headless Horse reimagined TEAM DR JOSEPH’s identity and packaging for a sustainable future

Founded in 1986, TEAM DR JOSEPH is an Italian and family-run luxury cosmetics brand offering handmade, organic and sustainable products. They approached Edinburgh-based branding, design and development studio Headless Horse, looking for a new identity and packaging system that would be both sustainable and sustained. In alignment with the quality of TEAM DR JOSEPH’s formulae, the new approach would also need to articulate the family’s attention to detail and commitment to producing result-driven skincare. As a result, the revised packaging system features a revised wordmark and the introduction of a new insignia, as well as typographic and material updates, including a recyclable wooden cap and FSC recycled paper produced domestically in Italy. In contrast to the direction of the old wordmark – a clean sans serif – the new wordmark and insignia aim to communicate the legacy and heritage of the brand. “The wordmark previously had a slogan beneath it, which we excluded to make the wordmark recognisable and to give a cleaner, concise appearance to an already long wordmark,” they say. “We implemented a new system for the packaging’s black bar, so we scaled the logo proportionally to this new system. A nice touch is that the glyphs for the 'T,’ ‘R’ and ‘J’ align to form a larger ‘J’ in the insignia, implying that the brand was once just Erb. Dipl. Dr Joseph Franz before expanding to the team that it is today.”