Designing a Bottle Label

Customer - Leal's Mexican Foods, Inc.

Date – January 2000

Job – Salsa Bottle Labels

Design Tools - Photoshop, and PageMaker

Design Notes:

A few years ago I was asked to design a bottle label for some salsa for a local restaurant that was having their traditional salsa bottled to be sold in the local retail stores. The family owned business was well respected and their salsa was requested often by the many patrons of their restaurant.

They had no specific ideas about the design, but the natural requirements of meeting the regulations of the food industry, like listing the nutritional facts, ingredients, bar code, and so on, leaving the design up to me to impress them. I agreed and said I would come up with a few ideas for them to look at.

I can’t really begin to cover all the pre-design processes and steps of coming up with the design concept other than to say it took several days of devoted effort. First I took a little trip to a couple of the local stores where the product would be sold and thus it would be on display. I wanted to get a sense of how the isle would look with one more brand of salsa.

      What would make this new salsa stand out?

      Would it be pleasing to the eye, as someone

            looked across the different choices?

      If I didn’t know the name of the restaurant what

            would cause me to desire to purchase it?

      What are the reasons I would even be buying salsa?

Going to the different stores, noting my observations, and then sampling a few friends on their feelings about salsa in general, when and how they used it and so on took several hours. Overall it didn’t take a lot of time; however the value of the information I gathered and the success of its use continues to grow even today.

     

The product was easily recognized, and unlike many other labels that are cluttered with graphics of vegetables the name captures the attention at first glance. I found, a lot of people buy salsa when they are having a party or gathering so I scattered light colors of confetti on a rustic adobe tan background. I also recommended that the name of the salsa be called “Salsa Festiva” meaning “Party Salsa” in Spanish. Finally, I found that a lot of people are very picky about their salsa and most love fresh homemade salsa. So instead of simply abusing the overly used title of “homemade”, I added a personal message from the family, mentioning how long they had been in business and that the same tradition at their home could now be at yours. I then had the son I was working with, hand sign, “the Leal’s”, for the personal touch.

The label was an instant hit with the restaurant and the salsa was an instant local hit in the retail stores and has continued to grow and be added into more and more stores across the panhandle of Texas including local Wal-Marts. Outside of the label itself there has been no additional advertising to spur the products success, only excellent service maintaining the retail accounts and seeing that their customer’s shelves have been stocked.