Client: Toca Botanica
Year: 20/21
Location: New York / Miami / San Juan
Scope: Strategy / Brand / Pack
Our rebrand of TOCA high-potency CBD anal and vaginal lubes is built around some flamboyantly fluid custom type, an elegantly cheeky typographic wink and sexually unapologetic imagery.
The viscerally engaging design marries a provocative attitude with a simple and understated aesthetic to reposition the brand as subversive and high-end.
The beautifully drawn bespoke wordmark is flamboyantly fluid in personality to represent oil, lube and general sexual wetness. The organic forms represent the high-quality plant-based ingredients, and the sensual movement of the touching letters evokes intimate physical contact.
The client wanted to make some noise with the design and talk about things considered taboo so gave us a green light to break out of the cliché botanicals photography and be a bit more incendiary.
The collages combine imagery from vintage pornography and NASA Hubble telescope photos to represent the CBD enhanced euphoria at climax, and found imagery of tropical forests represent the botanical ingredients and client location in Puerto Rico.
The name of the brand and products are Spanish. TOTO (“vulgar” slang for pussy) is designed for the vulva/vagina. QULO (from culo meaning arse) is designed with anal sex/play in mind.
Punctuation is used as an elegant counterpoint to the vulgar names to create elegantly simple shorthand symbols that represent genitalia; simultaneously provocative and completely innocent and uncensorable parenthesis. They are incorporated into the words—in each case replacing the “O” creating a cohesive link between the two products—and stand on their own.
Reference
Linder Sterling, Foxy Brown, Grace Jones, Roxy Music, Hawkwind / Barney Bubbles, Vintage Porn, Peter Behrens, Herb Lubalin / Ralph Ginzburg, Jamie Reid, Alfred Roller, Busby Berkeley, Koloman Moser, Space Disco
Brief
Aesthetic
Creative and imaginative to set the client apart and talk about things that are often taboo or misunderstood.
Simple, elegant and high-end.
Tropical looking to reflect the client location San Juan, botanical ingredients and the use of Spanish naming.
Personality
Queer
Bright
Bold
Colorful
Androgynous
Flamboyant
Creative
Weird
Provocative
Brave
Tone of Voice
Honest
Unapologetic
Bold
Forward
Empowering
Imagery
Very sexual
Pleasure focused
Sex positive
Cosmic
Fun and playful
Info
TOCA
TOCA (Spanish for Touch) is a plant-based, freaky, nature-loving, pleasure potion product line that enthusiastically affirms all peoples, bodies, sexualities, and genders. We believe in safe, healthy, consensual expressions of pleasure, desire, and play.
TOCA is a collaborative team of experienced clinical herbalists, farmers, medicine makers, sex educators, artists, and creatives.
We are plant lovers, sex lovers, and, ultimately, passionate about enthusiastic consent, authentic desire, and all the tools that bring pleasure and eros to the forefront of our well being and self expression.
We create organic products from high-quality ingredients using infused and essential oils, flower essences, stone essences, saltwater, and wind. We trust the elements, the plants, and the ecologies in which we live. We believe that plant medicine acts in subtle and complex ways that facilitate your own healing and well-being.
Our potions sink into your natural systems, explode your senses, and sizzle your loins. We want to make you tingle.
TOT({})
TOTO (Spanish slang for “pussy”) is an organic CBD botanical sex lube for all bodies. It is gently stimulating, warming and moving to the erectile tissue of the body. It helps increase natural lubrication of the vagina, reduce inflammation and pain in the pelvic erogenous zones, and increase pleasure and prolonged orgasm.
QUL(*)
QULO (derived from Culo Spanish for “ass”) is a CBD botanical sex lube made for all bodies. It is designed with anal sex/play in mind but is great for all erogenous zones.
