#HTE

Why Consumer Product Bottles are Always Wider Than They Are Deep

The branch of industrial design I spent the most time working in was called “structural package design,” i.e. bottles. Our SPD department was small compared to Graphics and Marketing, which is typical for most corporate I.D. gigs, and that was partially a function of how bottles were sold prior to the emergence of online shopping.

Just the five of us in SPD designed all of the bottles sold around the world by the global corporation that employed us. All of our consumer products, whether sold in Thailand, Peru or North America, were sold on store shelves. Consumers looked at our bottles, and looked at our competitors’ bottles standing next to them, and made a decision on which to purchase.

So we didn’t design our bottles in a vacuum. Marketing reviewed everything for “shelf presence”–when designing a vessel to hold 500mL of product, could we make it taller and wider than a competitor’s 500mL bottle? Could we provide enough label area for Graphics to create an eye-catching display? This is why, if you look at most consumer product bottles today, they are usually wider than they are deep–even where a cylindrical shape would make better ergonomic sense. (Note that this does not apply to carbonated beverages and aerosols, which are always in bottles with circular cross-sections for the same reason airplane fuselages are: To evenly distribute pressurization.)

The labeling is always, obviously, on the wider faces of the bottle. Which presents a problem for end users: Face labels really don’t make sense for storage. 

Look inside your medicine cabinet, pantry or garage. How are your bottles stored? Do you store them like this…

…so that you can see what each product is? Probably not. Imagine storing your books in this way; it would be ridiculous. You probably instinctively turn your wide-and-shallow bottles sideways for greater space efficiency. And unless you have memorized each bottle’s color and profile, you fish through them to find the one that you want.

Ideally bottles would be labeled like books, on their “spines” or handle sides so that they could be stored more space-efficiently.

In situations with standalone bottles, like with dishwashing soap or liquid soap hand pumps, I think most people instinctively place them face-out, presenting the label. Go into anyone’s bathroom and if they’ve got a liquid soap hand pump, I bet it’s placed face-out–even though this needlessly eats up a disproportionate amount of real estate on the sink.

In other words:

Bottles were traditionally sold on store shelves. And that shopping modality drove the design–which is not the best design for actual consumer convenience, but the best design to get you to buy them off of a store shelf.

But as we shall see in the next entry, this is beginning to change.