Norrø
Client
Norrø Skincare
Year
2026
Role
Art direction, identity, packaging
Discipline
Brand Identity
A quiet identity for a Nordic skincare line made from cold-water botanicals, built around sea glass, slow light and one patient typeface.
01 — Context
Norrø started in a fisherman’s shed on the Lofoten coast, where two chemists bottled serums from kelp and sea buckthorn. The products had a loyal local following and no visual identity at all. Every batch shipped in a different jar.
I led art direction, identity and packaging over five months, working closely with both founders, a packaging engineer in Oslo and a small print shop in Bodø.
02 — Challenge
The founders wanted to reach concept stores across Europe without losing the feeling of a small workshop. The system had to look premium on a Copenhagen shelf and still feel handmade when it arrived at your door.
There was a practical limit too. The lab still fills every bottle by hand, so whatever we designed had to print in small runs, change from batch to batch and cost almost nothing to update.
03 — Process
We spent a week on the coast collecting textures: frosted glass, wet slate, bleached rope. The palette came straight from that table. For type, we drew a narrow wordmark around a single ligature, the ø, which became the brand’s only flourish. Everything else stayed deliberately plain.
Early label tests went to the founders’ regular customers, not a focus group. We printed twenty versions on different papers, left them in bathrooms for a month and kept the ones that aged well.
04 — Solution
Frosted sea-glass bottles carry uncoated paper labels that soften with use. A modular grid holds ingredients, batch numbers and short notes from the lab. Secondary packaging uses one blind-debossed mark and no ink at all.
Photography follows the same restraint. Products are shot in grey northern daylight on the slate and rope from that first week, so the brand looks like the place it comes from.
05 — Outcome
The range launched in twelve stores in its first season. Moving to a single bottle size and a shared label grid cut packaging costs by a fifth.
In numbers
12
Stores in the first season
−21%
Packaging cost per unit
1
Bottle mould for the whole range
Credits
Art direction
Mara Ellis
Strategy
Jonas Berg
Copywriting
Ida Holm
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