Meet Director of Design Tim Hankins

You already know Tim Hankins, or rather his work. As Director of Design for Honest, he and his team are the creative minds behind the beautiful packaging and products that you use at home. You may be surprised to know that Tim’s favorite design is not one of our famous diaper patterns that his young son often inspires—it’s the DHA/Omega-3 supplements for the bottle’s clean look and feel and the hand-drawn fish illustrations! He also loves the scent (and effectiveness) of the Multi-Surface Cleaner for cleaning up at home. When he’s not at work, you’ll find him swimming with his family or dreaming of being a concert photographer. Now, in a departure from our regular Q&A, let’s hear from Tim directly about Honest’s design philosophy…

Delightful sophistication — or — design with a voice. It’s hard to pull off. We want to have fun with our brand and our products during the design process, but there’s a fine line between being fun and just being silly. The way we accomplish these delightful moments in a sophisticated way is with what we like to call our “tiny moments.” We hope they are small discoveries that are noticed by our customers and bring delight to you.

Our Chief Product Officer & Co-Founder Christopher Gavigan loves to create some of these moments in our product copy. Some examples from our cleaning products:

•   The final step in getting your dishes clean with our Pods? Smile.

•   While allowing our stain remover to soak into your clothes? Take Five!

•   Ready to wash your dishes with our dish brush? Have the kids do them!

“Surround yourself with things you love.” A simple message stating our philosophy, but this is one of the first things that, as a new customer, you would encounter on our free trial shipping box. We wanted to make sure that your first interaction with our products revealed our intentions from the start. Did you see this message upon opening the box the first time?

We really want to create a fun and engaging “unboxing” experience — that first opening of the box and reveal of what you’ve purchased. Apple does an incredible job with the first reveal of their products. We wanted to bring that type of experience to the unboxing of something typically less sexy than electronics — consumer goods. We want you to be excited when you see our flowers, our butterfly and our dragonfly sitting on your doorstep. Because customers are going to receive these boxes each month, shouldn’t they be nice to look at? And when you open that box, we don’t want the excitement to end. We cover the inside of our boxes in what we call the “Honest Pattern.” They are the “honest” phrases and mantras that fueled the creation of our products and their design. We live by these each and every day. It’s what drives us to make better products and packaging.

And after each item is taken out of the box, we left one final tiny moment for you to discover — our sincere thanks for making the choice to join our family and help make a difference in the world.

When these moments are discovered, we hope it leaves a lasting impression on our customers. It shows you the level of care and attention to detail that has been put into the design of our packaging — if we’ve spent this much time obsessing over the design, just think of what has gone into the details of creating the products themselves.

Have you discovered any of the many other tiny moments in our designs? Share your favorites!