Being Human

“Live life fully while you're here. Experience everything. Take care of yourself and your friends. Have fun, be crazy, be weird. Go out and screw up! You're going to anyway, so you might as well enjoy the process. Take the opportunity to learn from your mistakes: find the cause of your problem and eliminate it. Don't try to be perfect; just be an excellent example of being human.” ~ Anthony Robbins

It feels like I've finally reached a little plateau with the creation of my perfume packaging. Whew, what a long, winding, dynamic path this has been. I know the plateau is only a little respite from this dynamic realm. In either case, it feels good to take a breather and look back on the process...without the pitfalls along the path.

When I made the decision to put my perfumes on the market I began first with a color and design palette. From there I had a logo designed. During that process it occurred to me that checking into trademark of my company name would be a good idea, that's when Illuminated Perfume became Roxana Illuminated Perfume. Next I found a graphic designer and web coder to create the website. The website creation took what seemed like a millennium...and is to my distaste an ongoing process.

During a plane flight I had an idea to assign a color from the palette to each fragrance. At first I wasn't sure how I would utilize that idea, but, I liked the concept. I had my handy dandy award winning in-house artist create the illuminations for each fragrance.

The next item was the bottle. Unfortunately my bottle supplier did not have small quantities of my ideal, so I settled for the more generic Chanel-like bottle, for now. My mother use to create these lovely little gemstone pouches for my daughter and her girlfriends. Thus, I asked my mother to create a similar type pouch for my bottles. This is where the color palette came in handy. The collaboration of the pouch design with my mom has been terrific. I feel very blessed to have the opportunity to implement Greg's visual artwork and my mothers beautiful handwork into the creation of the brand.

With perfumes, logo, website, illustrations and pouches in tow I thought I was set. Until someone mentioned the box didn't fit the quality of the perfumes. Thus, for the last month we've been perfecting the box which includes a sticker on the top and a handmade silk pillow in the interior. Once again, I thought I was done. No, what about some enclosed information for the buyer of the perfume. Okay, so the latest, hot off the press, is a small, accordion folded paper with some information and imagery.

Thus, today I stand on this little plateau, looking over all the work that has gone into this first phase and I feel like I can take a breath. The local fires have subsided a bit, thus the deep inhale doesn't include too much of a smoke note.

Roxana Illuminated Perfume™

Images: Photo top and bottom of the new boxes with stickers, pouches and accordion mini brochure.