Davies Gate: Beautiful Inside and Out

Combining a love of nature and gardening with a passion for art and design, Ellen Davies, founder of Davies Gate, Irwindale, CA, has created a unique and innovative line of personal care products. The product formulations are developed in Ms. Davies’ own garden and the packaging is as unique as the products themselves. Ms. Davies has always had an interest in natural beauty products. It is her passion for art and aesthetics that leads to the products’ fresh looks. “To come up with one formula and then just change the color of each line doesn’t work for me. I call that formulaic packaging; Davies Gate will never do that,” she said. “All of our designs have a clean sensibility and unique design perspective. I refer to it as high design.”

The company appeals to both the consumer’s desire for a product that contains quality ingredients and packaging that sets it apart from the rest of the beauty products in the market. “Our consumer is an affluent female, 25-55, with a discriminating eye and a taste for new and different things.”

According to Ms. Davies, her mother loved beauty products, and she too became enamored with them at a young age. But Ms. Davies wasn’t content to just purchase these products; she wanted to create her own, using ingredients from her mother’s garden.

As she grew older, this fondness for gardening and beauty products grew into an interesting hobby. “Before it became a business, I would make things for family and friends. I experimented with distilling herbs in my garden for fragrances.”

Designed by Nature

After a short-lived career as a designer of fashion accessories, Ms. Davies and her husband and business partner, Jack, moved from the East to the West Coast. She recalled, “I knew I wanted to be in a design position, but I was much more interested as a consumer in beauty products than jewelry.” Tired of the frantic pace of New York, Ms. Davies and her husband relocated to California. According to Ms. Davies, “I felt like I was in a gardener’s paradise.” It was in her garden that the seed for Davies Gate was planted. She combined her love of design and her fascination with product formulations to create her first product—a triple-milled French soap derived from vegetables. The product was marketed in New York and according to Ms. Davies, “Things just started getting crazy, the product really took off.” From that one soap, the company’s first bath and body collection, GardenMade, was developed. Since then, Davies Gate has launched a series of success-ful collections.

Standing Out

Ms. Davies takes pride in the individuality of each product collection. She enthused, “You can definitely sense a personality in each line. It doesn’t look mass produced; the products look like they’ve been touched by a hand. Each of our collections looks so different.” Every collection emerges from one of Ms. Davies’ hobbies or interests. “We really consider ourselves a design house. We are unique not just in design but formulations. There are products in the market that don’t hold up on both fronts. A package can be beautiful, but the contents let you down. That’s our strength: we deliver both incredible packaging and amazing formulations.”

The Whole Package

Ms. Davies is involved in all aspects of her products’ development. She spends three to four months in the conceptual design phase, brainstorming ideas and testing them, both in terms of packaging and formulation. Once the concept is established, she works closely with a chemist to bring the formulation to completion. She also works with various packaging vendors to implement the design. According to Ms. Davies, she works with chemists to develop quality products, but fragrance is her strongest area of expertise. “I tend to dream up all different ideas. It’s that creativity that leads me to all kinds of new formulations,” she said.

Davies Gate conducts most research and development in-house, except for processes that require vendor expertise. Since the company works almost exclusively with stock packaging, Ms. Davies and her team source widely to find new and unusual components.

Davies Gate has grown rapidly since its inception in 1992. The company is launching two (as yet undisclosed) new collections in July. According to Ms. Davies, the company’s goal is to be “the most watched, most innovative company in our industry.” Within the next few months, the company expects to complete its website, www.daviesgate.com, which will give consumers another place to learn about and buy Davies Gate products.

Finding Inspiration

The Davies Gate product line comprises a variety of bath and shower products such as bar soaps, bath salts, shampoos and conditioners, bath and shower gels, body lotions, effervescent bath soaks and candles. Her first collection, GardenMade, and its offshoot, Perennials, were inspired by her love of gardening. GardenMade consists of natural garden herbs with a sweet note of orange blossom fragrance, and her second collection, Perrenials, elaborates on the natural garden theme with fragrances of lavender, white clover, rose and sage. Ms. Davies created ink rubbings of different plants in her garden for the packages’ image. The AquaChrome line, a modern art inspired collection, contains hip named scents such as blissbloom, cloudcake, dewdrop, limeluster, mossmist and seasilk. AquaChrome was inspired by the mid-20th century period in art. “All the patterns in the collection are completely unique. I would take aspects of things I like, but piece them together to create a unique design. Then I layered in a modern color palette so that the collection didn’t look retro. It has a clean, modern sensibility. We refer to it as ‘mod spa,’” explained Ms. Davies.

The SunTree collection with exotic lime, mandarin and quince scents is Asian-influenced and was inspired by Ms. Davies’ shopping trips to Chinatown. She loved the area’s unique packaging, describing it as raw and non-commercial. “All the boxes were inspired by different types of packaging from Asia,” according to Ms. Davies. She explained, “I wanted the line to have both a finished look and a handcrafted edge. I did wood block prints that formed the background images on the packages. The collection is about the delight of indulgence, of discovering something new inside a package that is as much fun as opening a present.” Davies Gate’s SunTree collection was recently nominated for a FiFi Award.

Birth of a Product Line

Her biggest inspiration lately has been the birth of her twin boys, spurring the launch of a baby line—Davies Babies. Ms. Davies worked on the packaging and concepts while she was pregnant, and waited to have the babies before introducing the actual line. All of the products have been tested on her twins.

“I wanted to test them first and see what worked best. Having twins kept me twice as busy, so it seemed like I never had a free hand,” she said. As a result, all of the Davies Babies products are designed to be used with one hand. “When using baby products, you want things to be fast and easy to use. I came up with packaging that has no secondary packages. We are the only company with a baby diaper cream in a pump form; most are in tubes or tubs. This is a very innovative product and something a mother really needs.” The diaper rash protection cream retails for $14.50.

In addition, the company developed a baby massage gel ($16.50) that becomes an oil when applied to a baby’s skin. The line also consists of All-over baby wash ($14.50), Baby balm ($16.50) and Natural glycerin teddy bear soap ($10.00).

The Davies Babies packaging is meant to be playful and fun so that it inspires mothers not to view changing or washing their baby as a task, but as an interactive and fun time. The illustrations on the label are fun and playful. The text on the products further elaborates this theme. Instead of more traditional product copy, the copy is written in the first person from the baby’s perspective and includes suggestions to sing nursery rhymes. Ms. Davies emphasizes, “The idea is to remind parents that the time they spend with their baby should be fun and special.”

Davies Gate products are sold at select Saks, Sephora, Bergdorf-Goodman and other fine specialty retailers nationwide.