Haircare · four-step system
Active Plus Kit
A four-step hair therapy range where the step number is the label.
The step number
is the label.
Challenge
A regimen only works if it is used in order. On a shelf, four black bottles carrying one logo read as four alternatives — the buyer picks the one that sounds closest to their problem, uses it alone, and the system never happens. The sequence had to be on the pack, not in the instructions.
Approach
One numeral per pack, set large enough to read across an aisle, in the single orange the range is allowed. It is not a badge in a corner: it runs most of the height of the front panel and it is the first thing the eye lands on.
Everything else is deliberately quiet — wordmark, product name and the salt-and-sulfate-free strip are all small, white, and set on matte black. Nothing on the front competes with the number, because the number is the navigation.
Process
Four steps meant four container types: a 1 L cylinder, an 825 ml pump, a 250 ml spray and a 500 ml jar. The artwork architecture is fixed across all four — wordmark top left, name beneath it, claim running vertically up the left edge, numeral filling the right — so the geometry can change without the system changing with it.
Back-of-pack carries Arabic and English at equal weight, with directions, warning, ingredients and the manufacturing marks in a fixed order on every pack, so a buyer who reads one has learned where to look on the other three.
Result
The range reads as a sequence from a distance and as four separate products in the hand, which is the order those two decisions actually get made in. A fifth step would cost one numeral and one name — the rest of the pack is already built to take it.
Step four is a jar
A mask is scooped, not poured, so the fourth step is the one format in the range that cannot be a bottle. The numeral had to survive the move: on a 500 ml jar there is roughly a third of the label height a 1 L bottle gives you.
The 4 is set to the same cap height as the 1, not to the same proportion of its panel — so across the four packs the numerals match each other rather than matching their own containers.
Step three runs off the edge
The 250 ml leave-in is the narrowest pack in the kit — roughly half the panel width of the 1 L shampoo. Held to the same cap height as the others, the 3 no longer fits between the label edges.
So it is cropped by the pack rather than shrunk to fit it. A numeral scaled down to sit inside that panel would have stopped being legible from a metre away, which is the only job it has.
