P&G-owned hair care brand Herbal Essences is producing the first-ever mass hair care bottle design in North America that will make it easier for vision-impaired consumers to distinguish its shampoo and conditioner products through the sense of touch. The newly enhanced package features tactile indentations that will help differentiate the brand’s shampoos from its conditioners in-shower given they share the same bottle shape, alleviating in-shower confusion and helping consumers confidently perform daily tasks.
 
Behind the initiative is creator Sumaira “Sam” Latif, P&G’s special consultant for inclusive design, who has been with the company for over 18 years and is herself blind. Latif’s unique perspective sparked the idea, which was refined by working with other individuals who are vision impaired. In fact, they represent some of the 253 million people worldwide or 23 million people in the U.S. today who face the challenges associated with vision impairment every day.
 
 “Imagine the daily challenges, like choosing matching clothes in the morning or simply taking a shower after a long day. As a blind person, you must do these things using touch rather than sight. You don’t really know which bottle the shampoo, conditioner, or soap is…you have to get creative. I used to put an elastic band around shampoo or sellotape on conditioner to remind me,” says Latif speaking from personal experience. And as it relates to the bottle design, she says the intention was clear: “It was important that we invent a feature, universally recognizable tactile feature, which would work for people who haven’t had the opportunity to learn braille.”
 
The shampoo bottles have four tactile vertical lines on the bottom of the back label and the conditioner has two rows of dots on the bottom of the back label. The features were purposely kept very simple and easy to differentiate by touch. The brand hopes that once people learn about the new tactile features, they will easily be able to tell their shampoo and conditioner apart by touch.
 
 The production to create the new bottle feature was not a seamless one, according to Latif. “While the solution might sound relatively simple, we process hundreds of bottles a minute, so changing a manufacturing process is complicated when you’re dealing with those kinds of quantities.”
 
Shane Mays, Herbal Essences Packaging Engineer, and Latif became instant friends working on this project together. “In my 15 years working at P&G, I have never worked on a project with as much personal passion as this one. I am so incredibly proud of what we are doing and the impact we will have. This pride and passion was contagious across the entire manufacturing team who worked together to make this possible on the fast manufacturing lines,” expresses Mays.