Dimple — A clear vision for change
Brand strategy, Brand writing, Campaign identity, Icon design, Identity system, Logo & brand marks, Packaging,
Style guides, Site design
Launching in Australia in February 2019, Dimple is a direct-to-consumer daily contact lens subscription service. While there have been a number of similar international companies (Hubble in the US, Waldo in the UK) who have launched successfully, Dimple is the first to create an inclusive lifestyle brand, making strides towards shifting user behaviour in a historically sterile industry.
In Australia, four manufacturers control 97% of the contact lens market. With OPSM and Specsavers holding the monopoly, accounting for 40% of industry turnover, there has been little to no effort required to brand their products. Packaging has always been designed with the optometrist in mind — storable, stackable — leaving a sea of white, clinical branding that lacks any connection with its consumers.
So how do you reposition a traditionally stale, impersonal product to something that resonates with its millennial-skewed market? That’s where we came in.
Building a brighter branding system
The identity we created comes from the fact that, for the most part, everyone’s left and right eye prescription is different. We created an illustrative suite of 60 colourful, complementary circles that correspond to each power number (from -12.00 to +6.00) and combine to show the vast number of combinations of individual prescriptions.
And the brand system doesn’t just look beautiful, but answers a huge flaw in existing contact lens blister packs. By creating these custom patterns (IDs) for each individual power number and displaying them boldly on each blister, it’s significantly easier for users to identify the pack that’s specific to each eye… especially when they don’t have their contacts in.
It’s what inside that counts
Packaging was a hugely important component to this task. As a direct-to-consumer company, we wanted the unboxing experience to be an utterly unexpected delight. From the blister packs coated in our custom pattern IDs to the boxes, mailers, sleeves and monthly information cards, we designed the entire packaging suite with our millennial market at the forefront of our minds.
A campaign for a vibrant community
The art direction we took for the launch centres on a vibrant community of contact lens wearers and packs a highly visual punch. Shot by Jonathan May, it celebrates the individual quirks of each member of the community and the freedom to have fun that contact lenses provide them.
By partnering with the Benito Martin and Jessica Johnson dream team for our product shoot and Lyndon Foss for our lifestyle shoot, we built a comprehensive and flexible suite of brand assets that could be used across web, communications, social and advertising in the year following the launch.
Talking to a generation
Part of creating a consumer-facing brand also meant developing a distinctly Dimple tone of voice that could be rolled out across all product and service messaging and gathered in a guide to be handed over to the Dimple social media team.
We also brought the brand to life in the digital space, incorporating the key brand assets such as photography, iconography and illustration to enhance the user experience.
Part of this included designing an innovative and interactive purchasing method that puts selecting your prescription power at the front and centre of the process. Our bold, easy-to-use interface makes the purchasing process easy and provides exciting visual easter eggs throughout sign-up. No more tiny drop-downs.
The willingness of Dimple to upturn an unadventurous market meant we were able to work with a clear and incredibly exciting purpose: create a truly tailored brand that puts users at the centre of the experience — shifting the way they consume and interact with their contact lens provider. And, well, the future of contact lenses looks pretty good to us.
