bleucoeur studio and Dysign conceptualise SÈVE as an object to keep

The Brand Identity: SÈVE is designed to be kept. That framing – treating a bar of soap as an object closer in logic to a candle – sits at the foundation of the conceptual botanical soap brand developed by Raphaël Renoncourt of bleucoeur studio with 3D direction by Dylan Sidoine of Dysign, in response to a brief from The New Brief, a weekly design prompt for designers. “The first thing we did was move SÈVE out of the beauty category,” Renoncourt explains.

“We saw it more as an object you keep than a product you consume.” Everything that followed, including the French-language system, the tree-specific colours and the pared-back packaging structure, traces back to that opening move. Illustrated flowers, leaves and olfactory suggestion were all discarded in favour of a system that positions SÈVE as a botanical soap house with a precise geographic identity. Pin Clair’s warm yellow comes from the shade of cut pine planks and carries an invigorating quality that matches the soap type. Sapin Profond pulls toward a dense green that references fir needles and forest density.

Bouleau Blanc stays in neutral tones to suggest calm. “The colours are codified, but they do not point to abstract ideas,” Renoncourt shares. “They are always tied to a specific tree, an identifiable material, and a use.” The typography anchors the bottom of every box and bar at scale. Arpona, a bold serif, was used for the wordmark. Renoncourt exploited the shortness of the brand name to push the type to near-architectural presence, taking cues from the way luxury brands use typography. Turnip handles variant names and section headers, while Helvetica was chosen as a neutral counterpart for body text and secondary information.

“When you are working with two typefaces as characterful as Arpona and Turnip, the supporting text needs to disappear,” Renoncourt notes. Before pattern, and before colour, the layout came first. A band with slightly clipped corners sits at the top of the front face of the box, holding the sap name on the left and the soap type on the right. SÈVE fills the base. From one variant to the next, only the background colour and pattern shift. The rigid base means the range rests on very few variables. Only once that structure was set did the bark patterns arrive.

Rather than illustrating them, Renoncourt sourced high-resolution photographs of real bark. Finding images with consistent lighting, tonality and angle across species proved harder than expected. Once vectorised, the bark was rendered in solid black and placed inside the fixed clipped-corner rectangle at the top of each box. “The bark is the skin of the tree,” Renoncourt shares. “That parallel with our own skin and with the use of soap came quite naturally.” He also found an advantage in the unevenness between species.

“What creates coherence across the range is not the similarity of the patterns to each other, it is the repetition of the frame. Within that fixed frame, each bark can be slightly different. Exactly like a stamp effect, an impression that never repeats in the same way.” The trace and imperfection of each bark stamp pulls SÈVE back toward something organic and manual.

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The article discusses a unique approach to branding a product as a collectible, which is significant for the luxury and sustainability sectors, while offering actionable insights for brand strategy professionals.