Greenwood School, a Waldorf-inspired pre-kindergarten through 8th grade based in Mill Valley, CA, worked with Elixir to develop a marketing strategy, brochure and admissions kit.

The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf — A set of tins was part of a comprehensive brand visual language that Elixir developed for the coffee retailer’s ’09 holiday promotion.

The National Fish & Wildlife Foundation 2009 Fundraiser — Elixir designed the invitation and collateral for the event honoring Julie Packard, Executive Director of the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

Elixir has been retained by the owners of Hotel Healdsburg and h2hotel in Healdsburg (67 miles north of San Francisco), to redesign the packaging of their spa products. Recently reformulated with natural and organic botanical ingredients, the line will include: Meyer Lemon & Sage Shampoo and Bath Gel; Lavender, Jasmine & Blood Orange Conditioner; Lavender, Rosemary & Orange Blossom Lotion; and Lavender, Rosemary & Sweet Orange Soaking Salts. Both hotels will feature the spa products in their guest rooms.

Since 2001, the Hotel Healdsburg has been Sonoma County’s premier luxury wine country lodging. Its sister, h2hotel, opens today. The new LEED Certified, eco-friendly property includes solar heat, a living roof, innovative heating and air systems, and an underground cistern for water collection. Construction used a combination of  sustainable and local materials.

For reservations or more information:

Hotel Healdsburg
25 Matheson Street
Healdsburg, CA 95448
T 707.431.2800

h2hotel
219 Healdsburg Avenue
Healdsburg, CA 95448
T 707 922-5251

The Spa Hotel Healdsburg
327 Healdsburg Avenue
Healdsburg, CA 95448
T 707.433.4747

Jennifer Jerde, Elixir’s Founder and Creative Director, was honored to be one of seven judges of Exhibitor Magazine’s 24th Annual Exhibit Design Awards. Winners were announced in the May issue of the magazine and recently published online.

Samsung Electronics won the top honor for the optical illusion they created via mirror-covered ceiling & walls paired with light projections through the exhibit’s glass floor. The design showcased Samsung’s new generation of LED TVs (144 were present on eight floor-to-ceiling columns). Other winners—from an impressive array of international entries—included Teknion, Automobili Lamborghini, Eternit, Autodesk, Audi, SpinVox, Saudi Telecom, Daimler, Herman Miller, Sony, Yokohama, O.C. Tanner and Ewo.

Elixir is excited that our packaging for Golden Star Tea Company is included in Box Bottle Bag. The new book from The Dieline and HOW Books features “the best of the best” in packaging design.

About the book, author and The Dieline Editor Andrew Gibbs says “Great packaging adds more than just monetary value to a product—it adds emotional value. It has the power to directly trigger the emotions of the consumer, and is what makes someone fall in love with a product, or even hate it. It’s that emotional connection that makes a design a success.”

When asked about working with Elixir, Golden Star Tea Company’s CEO Eddie Carden added:

“We came to Elixir with a packaging design challenge, and we communicated it to them as a story. Elixir is intuitive, expert at listening, and what they came back with was remarkable. They converted our story into a design, translated that into a prototype, and now the story we hear back from people looking at our package design is the same one we told Elixir at the beginning. We wanted the packaging to make a promise regarding the quality of the product inside the bottle. Elixir’s design successfully communicates to our customers the type of experience they might expect, and it sets their expectations high, exactly where we want them.”

To read more about the book and its author or purchase a copy, click here.

Elixir’s packaging for Golden Star Tea Company will also be featured this fall in the Graphis Design Annual 2010.

Naturopathica—founded in 1995 and based in East Hampton, New York—reached out to Elixir to rebrand itself with a relaunch of its skin and beauty products. At that time, the line was carried by select high profile spas around the country and sold direct online. Naturopathica enjoyed a small loyal following but was frustrated by a fiercely competitive marketplace brimming with false claims. Barbara Close, Founder and CEO, knew the brand was flying under the radar and suspected that the packaging’s home-grown look and misperceptions about the performance of botanical skin care were factors that needed to be addressed.

As part of our North Star process, Elixir conducted 1-on-1 interviews with current & prospective customers and spa partners to help Naturopathica understand how their brand was perceived. The findings illuminated the gap between current perceptions and desired positioning, inspiring the company to undertake a comprehensive retooling of everything from product to packaging. The company reformulated many of it’s products—replete with sustainable, certified-organic and wildcrafted ingredients—to earn ECOCERT certification, while Elixir developed the elevator pitch and redesign of Naturopathica’s brand visual language—including identity, business system, style guide and packaging for nearly 100 products.

Barbara Close sums up her Elixir experience to date:

“We have worked with various design and branding firms over the years. When I reviewed Elixir’s portfolio, I felt there was great attention to detail and adherence to simplicity, both very important for Naturopathica.

Elixir put us front and center. Everyone on the team was an excellent listener, so we felt really ‘met.’ They understood our lineage of apothecary and the challenge of honoring our roots and telling our story in an interesting visual way. Elixir’s North Star process helped us unearth our gems and bring them out into our materials. They were great at helping us get to an unexpected place, what I call ‘the aha factor.’ The whole process has been very exciting.”

Elixir designed three custom bottle shapes with emboss of Naturopathica’s logotype. A custom color was applied to the remaining off-the-shelf containers providing consistency across 48 retail skus.

All collateral and packaging is made from 100% recycled fibers with a minimum of 35% post-consumer material.

Look for it online at at www.naturopathica.com and at the finest holistic spas (in San Francisco at Therapeia and Studio C Skincare; in Sausalito at Cavallo Point; in Berkeley at Claremont Resort & Spa).

Details post-comping for an early presentation of look & feel referencing the vintage typography and palette of ‘apothecary.’

Botanical images were sourced specifically by species and region from the University and Jepson Herbaria at the University of California, Berkeley.

Taylor’s Automatic Refresher—the Bay Area’s classic and well-loved hamburger & fries eatery—reopens this week as Gott’s Roadside. Elixir was retained to rename and then develop the new identity. Collateral included a website, menus, signage, apparel and packaging.

You’re invited to help Gott’s celebrate this Thursday, March 25 from 6-9 p.m. at San Francisco’s Ferry Building and again on Friday, March 26 from 6-8 p.m. at their St. Helena and Napa locations. Free cheeseburgers, ahi burgers, Seoul burgers and fries will be served, and Elixir-designed t-shirts will be given away. Visit http://gottsroadside.com/ for directions. We hope to see you there!

Joel and Duncan Gott opened their original St. Helena location in 1999.

A second location opened in 2004 in San Francisco’s gourmet mecca, the Ferry Building Marketplace.

Gott’s opened at Napa’s Oxbow Public Market in 2008.

Elixir is honored to be working with the San Francisco Symphony on an invitation to their sneak preview of Keeping Score: Season 2. Keeping Score is the San Francisco Symphony’s national project to make classical music more accessible and meaningful to people of all ages and musical backgrounds, and a key component of its almost century-long history of music education.

More than five million viewers tuned into the first season of Keeping Score on PBS in November 2006 with documentaries on Ludwig van Beethoven, Igor Stravinsky, and Aaron Copland. Season 2 features three new programs that explore the music and stories behind Hector Berlioz’s symphonic love letter Symphonie fantastique; Charles Ives’s sonic portrait of New England in his Holidays Symphony; and Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5, a work that may ultimately have saved his life.

The San Francisco Symphony and Michael Tilson Thomas premiere the second season of the Keeping Score television series on PBS on Thursday, October 15, 2009 at 10 p.m. (check local listings). Click here to watch the trailer. The programs work in tandem with an interactive website, www.keepingscore.org, a national radio series, and a national model education program for K-12 teachers that helps them integrate classical music into core subjects.

Invitation; event collateral: auction preview, program, pledge + table cards.

Smiley faces at the table. Photo: Drew Altizer.

Standard Bearers: Stanlee Gatti and Stanley Burrell (aka MC Hammer). Photo: Drew Altizer.

Kyle and Jen. Photo Credit: Drew Altizer

Becca Prowda and her husband, Tipping Point Founder-Director Daniel Lurie. Photo: Drew Altizer.

Light up the night. Photo: Catherine H. Bigelow.

For a gallery of guests (all smiley) and in-depth reportage of the event, we recommend Catherine’s post on 7×7.

Athleta has been acquired by the Gap after a decade of designing women’s athletic apparel. The purchase was completed last Fall, and Athleta’s website recently relaunched under the Gap umbrella of brands…

Elixir worked directly with Athleta founder Scott Kerslake from the earliest days, collaborating on the name and creating the still-in-use identity. Also, Elixir’s catalog concept supported initial fundraising efforts. Over the next seven years Elixir evolved the brand’s strategy, catalog design, and art direction. Back in the late 90s, both the nascent brand and its catalog were innovative, providing a new perspective by focusing on the confluence of performance and fashion.

Our congratulations to Athleta on its splash into the big brand pond. Go team!

For those of you considering a flooray into the world of “art for the floor” consider the advice of the Financial Times, which has separately described Claremont Rug as “one of the world’s best sources of antique carpets.” You can read more about Claremont’s business and one-of-a-kind “white glove service” at the New York Times.

Shown here: a handful of Claremont Rug’s newest acquisitions. At the showroom, you can see, touch, and put your best foot forward on museum-quality rugs. {6087 Claremont Avenue, Oakland CA 94618. Hours: Mon – Sat 11.00 am – 6.00 pm}

Hadji Jallili Tabriz – 3rd Quarter, 19th century

Laver Kirman – circa 1875

Kashan – late 19th century

Sultanabad – late 19th century