Nivea Rings in the New Year with a New Look

New year, new look - for Nivea.

The 101-year-old skin-care brand has done a head-to-toe makeover with a focus on sustainability. Designer, Yves Béhar, from Fuseproject, created a new Nivea logo that serves as both a redesign and branding revision. The new logo will appear on all product packaging, which is itself in the process of being remade by Béhar and team. The entire product line - more than 1,600 stockkeeping items - will gradually be re-done through 2015.

It was a long overdue change. The company has grown and in the last couple of years, has pulled out of the makeup and hair-care categories and returned to it's core - skin care.

"We lost our Nivea-ness," Gusko admitted. "The landscape had changed, impacting us, and it was quite clear we had to do something on this one, and this was the ignition for starting this project of a new Nivea design language."


The revised logo takes Nivea back to its roots, emulating the iconic tin container, which contains the original skin cream. It is the last product still manufactured in Hamburg, sells 100 million units a year and has so far escaped the makeover. Beiersdorf would like to keep it that way but Béhar feels differently - one of the rare friendly disagreements between the partners.

Over the last two-and-a-half years, Béhar and his team visited Germany at least 30 times to meet with an internal design management group of 200 people from across Beiersdorf. They discussed everything from sales to packageing.

"For me there was an element of being sort of respectful - about finding a place in time when Nivea was at its purest expression - and trying to do that again, trying to celebrate that," said Béhar.

The first of the packaging redo to be launched is the Nivea Body Milk. The new bottle resembles an old-fashioned milk bottle, hinting at the idea of nourishment, said Béhar.

These new bottle shapes also result in tighter packing, fewer shipping materials and optimized transportation. This has reduced the packing materials by 15% and label materials by 23%. Additionally, the number of shipping pallets will be reduced, and 585 tons of carbon dioxide emissions will be eliminated annually. Being environmentally friendly also saves money and appeals to emerging markets, which will be the source of an estimated 50 percent of the company's sales by 2015.