California Tan

Laying out a Plan for Product Development

California Tan is a leading manufacturer and marketer of professional salon suntan lotion products. Since its acquisition by Australian Gold (another long-time TricorBraun customer), the new company now represents eleven different brands.

“It’s a really exciting time for our company as a whole,” said Castelnuovo-Tedesco. “Our goal is to continue to develop and market brands that are very distinctive.”

Design Innovation

One of the company’s latest product lines, Cypher™, is certainly living up to Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s expectations. The package, which is internally called “the cobra,” began as an idea in Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s sketchbook.

“One of the things I love about working with TricorBraun is their excellent design abilities,” said Castelnuovo-Tedesco. “They are very willing to try new things and they offer a lot of expertise in many areas.”

For the Cypher packaging, TricorBraun’s design and engineering experts took Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s sketch and began to work on the footprint, the actuator and the other components that would make up the final packaging product. The team worked back and forth with California Tan over several months.

“They had a lot of great insights,” said Castelnuovo-Tedesco. “They ensured that the shape matched the simplicity of my idea. Overall, it was a very, very positive experience.” International Sourcing While finding international sources for Cypher wasn’t necessarily California Tan’s main goal, it has given them many more options. According to Castelnuovo-Tedesco, TricorBraun’s sourcing expertise has allowed the company to utilize more techniques and more materials while saving more money.

“I appreciate the ability to speak directly with the people involved in my project. It’s not unusual for me to have a conference call with four TricorBraun representatives who are each in different parts of the world.”
– Carin Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Vice-President of Creative Services

Complex Componentry

There are seven different components to the Cypher “cobra” bottle. Each is custom designed and many are manufactured in different locations around the world.

“It was really important to us that all of these parts come as tightly put together as possible,” said Castelnuovo-Tedesco. “We didn’t want to hand over a bunch of little pieces to our filling supplier. TricorBraun worked with our quality control division to have the parts delivered in a way that was the simplest to put together as possible. It’s just another example of how they go the extra mile.”

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