ABOUT

BACKGROUND
Ruth Mastenbroek grew up in England and the United States. She trained classically as a perfumer with Naarden International (now Givaudan) in Holland and in Grasse, France, before working as a perfumer in England, Holland and Japan. She has created fragrances for Jo Malone (including the famous grapefruit candle), Kenneth Turner and Jigsaw and started her own perfume house in 2010. Her eponymous range received rave reviews, but sales were nowhere near expectations and, having worked with WMH on Prismologie, she approached us to help her transform her own brand’s performance.

STRATEGY
The market was suffering from saturation with a plethora of niche brands launching each year, making it harder for consumers to understand and find their perfect fragrance. If the Ruth Mastenbroek range were to succeed, it would need to rediscover a simple truth and express it in a single minded way. Ruth’s story is extraordinary. She is one of the only independent British female perfumers and one of a very few, revered ‘noses’. She has developed an intriguing palette of scents, directly associated with memories of the places she has lived and the events that have happened in her life. It is this palette of scents that she uses to create her small collection of exquisite, very high end fragrances. WMH developed a simple brand truth – ‘Every Drop Tells a Story’.

SOLUTION
WMH expressed ‘Every Drop Tells a Story’ by creating delicate, droplet shaped illustrations using intricately layered back-lit, cut paper. These echo the layers of the scent that Ruth Mastenbroek reveals in her fragrances. The illustrations are the focal point of the design simply because they tell the story. This is backed up with a paragraph on the pack rear that eloquently explains the influences behind each fragrance.