Fresh New Look for Irish Spring Soap Stylishly Evolves Legacy Brand

Colgate-Palmolive and Chase worked in tandem with the structural design team at Tin Horse to evolve the bottle to sleek and sophisticated, allowing it to stand out on shelf from competing brands.
Images courtesy of Chase Design Group

IS_Boxes Before and After-2web.jpg — For the bar soap, the richer green is enhanced by the new clover icon. The large multi-packs provide the canvas, similar to a travel poster, highlighting the refreshing destinations of Irish Spring.

You don’t have to be Irish to love the fresh, clean scent of Irish Spring soap. Since the brand was introduced in 1970, Colgate-Palmolive has touted the distinctive original fragrance of the enduring green and white deodorant bar soap targeted to men who want to smell good. Since then, the brand has added several scents and products including body washes.

Looking to expand its appeal to a younger male consumer, Colgate-Palmolive tapped creative agencies, Chase Design Group (graphic design) and Tin Horse (structural design), to work as a team with the Colgate-Palmolive Global Design Brand Group for a rebrand that better reflects stylish, modern masculinity.

The design team married the new brand promise, smell from a nice-smelling place, with the versatility of its iconic assets - a richer green Irish Spring structure, white brand mark and golden clover symbol - to create a sleek, modern look that confidently pays homage to the brand’s legacy. The brand promise appears across all new advertising and marketing materials. The ad campaign supporting the rebrand will air during this year’s Super Bowl on February 13.

“Communicating the pure essence of Irish Spring required moving beyond its past and developing a discreet and stylish presence with a system that facilitates distinction between the variants,” says Steve Dunphy, Executive Creative Director, Chase Design Group, New York.

The new body wash package design celebrates simplicity and is clearly rooted in the brand’s cleansing power and nature’s raw beauty. A bespoke refreshing natural scene adorns each of the various scents: Original Clean along with Moisture Blast, Active Scrub, Aloe Mist, 5-in-1, Charcoal Refresh, Ultimate Wakeup, Black Mint, and Sage Cedar for a total of 13 SKUs.

The new, modern brand mark was designed to work with the streamlined structure and appeal to the younger male consumer. “We created a restrained aesthetic style by using a title case and bold sans-serif typography that retains the fresh white color of the old brand mark, and added a lock-up with a stylized clover in a warm golden hue. It effectively serves as a timeless symbol for the brand’s legacy,” says Dunphy.

“The spirit and essence of Irish Spring is coming through in a fresh new way through breathtaking layered computer-generated images of landscapes that invite you into an experience” said Monica Goodman (Colgate-Palmolive Design) and Jamila Aubain (Colgate-Palmolive Marketing).