Industrial designer Eugene Whang spent years at Apple working closely with chief design officer Jony Ive, in addition to running his own record label and designing interior objects such as the vase he created with Bunny, but the travel kit he has designed for Pharrell’s skincare brand Humanrace is his first foray into beauty.
Some of the sketches Whang made during the design process of the travel kit
You wouldn’t know it by looking at the sleek, petite design, which folds up to a negligible size when placed in a suitcase or bag. That may be because the pouch, or ‘roll’ as Whang calls it, is a continuation of the mission he embraces with every project: ‘learning how to reduce and remove the unnecessary to arrive at something that feels natural and logical, while still feeling human and having some unique character’, as he tells us over a call from his home in San Francisco.
The roll is made from a single sheet of ‘Ultrasuede’, a partially plant-based material developed in Japan by Toray Industries, a pioneer of advanced industrial materials. The lightweight, slightly textured material has been left undyed to keep its environmental impact to a minimum, while serving to contain four Humanrace products: 7D Retrograde Gel Cleanser, Lotus Enzyme Exfoliator, Humidifying Face Cream, and Humidifying Body Cream.
The travel kit in production
If anything, being from outside the industry helped give Whang a fresh perspective on what the commonplace travel case could be. ‘I think coming from outside of the beauty and skincare world probably gave me a bit of a different insight on how to approach the problem,’ says Whang. ‘I think people that are designing within this industry often default to particular standard solutions that we wanted to avoid.’
Those standards were avoided by creating an item that uses as little material as possible, contains the exact amount of what you need for a week-long journey, and that, once finished, takes up no extra space in your bag. Says Whang, ‘My goal was that at the end of that trip, this holder would essentially take up zero space. It felt silly that a lot of these pouches, no matter how much of the product you’ve used, leave you with this large volume taking up space in your bag.’
A close-up of the travel kit ties
It’s a design in keeping with Humanrace’s own mission, namely keeping skincare simple and accessible by eliminating any unnecessary steps or products.
As Pharrell said when the brand launched in 2020, ‘there is nothing more important, now more than ever, than our wellbeing, it’s our greatest resource’.
He continued, ‘It was really important for me to create something that reflected that ethos and create something that was accessible and inclusive. This year was the right year to create a platform for that. Our first product was Humanrace skincare because over the years, I’ve really learnt how to take care of my skin, and subsequently, discovered the positive impact it taught me on how to take care of myself and others.’
