ChapStick
Agency
Front Row
Role
Associate Brand Strategy Director
Year
2025
Scope
Strategy · Identity · Wordmark · Packaging system
Challenge
ChapStick has been in American pockets since 1880, the category creator, the #1 lip balm by volume, with roughly 40 million purchasers a year and near-universal awareness. And the category it invented was exploding: a $3B global lip care market growing 8% a year, with lip balm searches up 112% and lip oils up 730% in two years.Yet the brand leading none of that conversation was the one whose name literally means the category.
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The problem wasn't awareness, reach, or distribution. The problem was relevance. Ubiquity had made ChapStick invisible: always in the background, never top-of-mind.Â
Strategy
The human truth was hiding in the behavior itself: ChapStick doesn't get applied ceremoniously. People reach for it mid-life, mid-motion, mid-everything, between checking the mirror and walking out, between laughs, looks, and lip-locks. The category sells routines and rituals; ChapStick actually lives in the spaces between them.
The Work
A ground-up evolution to modernize a heritage brand. The wordmark was evolved, not reinvented: the familiar script preserved, lifted at a 40-degree tilt inspired by ChapStick's own angled typography in 1930s archival ads, and scaled up over 160% on pack for shelf presence that's unmistakably ChapStick, but built for today.
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The packaging system spans 40+ SKUs on four principles: iconic visual language, bold brand presence, preserved color equity, and clear communication. Each tier follows its own logic, efficacy-led Medicated and Moisturizer, ingredient-forward Flavors, personality-driven Collections, with color as the primary navigation tool and a bespoke seal system unifying the range.
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