Pentagram has developed the bottle design and shipping box for Heights, a brain health and wellness startup with a simple purpose—to elevate and extend cognitive performance by nourishing the brain. The first product for this new brand is a smart supplement with clever content, intelligently delivered through the letterbox and inbox.

Specifically designed to give the brain the fuel it needs to improve its health and performance, Heights uses natural ingredients in the most biologically active form, supplemented with content from world leading experts on how to optimise your brainpower.

As Heights is a direct to consumer brand, the design of the bottle was driven by two factors: it needed to be highly distinctive in order to launch the brand, and it also needed to be less than 25mm thick to fit through the letterbox for efficient delivery and a great customer experience. Eschewing the usual cold, science-like design language used by supplement brands, the bottle shape has a soft asymmetric form like a thought bubble, which provides a large flat window onto the capsules, which have a transparent casing revealing the natural ingredients inside. 

The design team used a combination of software simulation and extensive development and prototyping with the blow moulding manufacturer and bottle filling line to achieve the distinct bottle shape. The narrow neck tapers into the main body of the bottle, which makes it easy to remove two pills at a time, while still ensuring it could easily be filled with capsules. The resulting design was tested and pre-launched using PET plastic but developed with sustainable and biodegradable PLA material in mind for mass production. 

Working with Pentagram, Giraffe Innovation modelled the environmental impacts of Heights' packaging using Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) to understand exactly the contribution of packaging to climate change and carbon dioxide emissions (CO2e). This showed that Heights performs well within the sector and that the bottle has a similar carbon footprint as watching a film on Netflix or 6 grams of plain yoghurt. 

In order to minimise the carbon footprint and stay within the 25mm overall package thickness for economic delivery, a special shipping box was designed from moulded sugar cane pulp—a sustainable, biodegradable material that is a byproduct from the sugar refining industry. Formatted as a hinged tray, it transports the bottle safely while only adding 0.75mm to the overall thickness of the shipping package. Moveable inner trays hold the bottle and literature securely and can be replaced for shipping future products.