In 2005, Herbal Essences found itself losing market share. The 35-year-old hair care brand had aged with the Boomers who had grown up with it, but it wasn’t well differentiated, and was resonating with fewer and fewer consumers every year. After investigating the market, parent company Procter and Gamble saw an opportunity to reinvent the brand for a more targeted consumer: Millennial women in their late teens and early 20s. But a new market brought different values and expectations around experience, branding, and packaging. So P&G came to Ziba to understand these expectations, and the uniquely Millennial attitude toward self-care in general and hair care in particular. Only then could the Ziba team differentiate the product packaging to be relevant for a new generation.

After defining this new target and their values, attitudes and behaviors, Ziba came up with a redesigned pair of Herbal Essences bottles, which embodied the spirit of change. The new bottles were ‘Tango,’ a flirtatious form in motion. The candy-colored shampoo and conditioner bottles ‘dance’ together—the shampoo right side up and the conditioner upside down. A simple flip of the graphic label application differentiates shampoo from conditioner, while the nesting forms inspired retailers to sell shampoo and conditioner side-by-side, rather than separately as they had traditionally been sold.

Herbal Essences’ new bottles connected with their consumers. Sales increased $30M in the first year. Thanks to the new, paired shelving of shampoo with its complementary conditioner, conditioner sales were higher than ever before. In the years since, the “nesting” approach to bottle design has been embraced by numerous brands in the P&G family.