Dr Pickles had built a loyal following with tattoo artists and the people who love their ink. The brief was to take that loyalty and translate it for mainstream pharmacy: a brand that earned its place in tattoo studios needed to earn its place in Chemist Warehouse, without losing the credibility that got it there.
The challenge — from tattoo studio to pharmacy shelf
Tattoo aftercare lives in two worlds. The specialty world, where credibility comes from artists, recommendations and ink-studio shelves. And the mainstream pharmacy world, where credibility comes from category codes, recognisable typography and shelf trust. The brand needed to read confidently in both without compromising either.
The insight — lean into the cult, just give it a wider gateway
Morice & Co didn’t dilute the tattoo-shop heritage — they sharpened it. The Dr Pickles wordmark stayed character-led and the colour territory stayed confident. What changed was the system around it: packaging hierarchy, range navigation and shelf logic tuned for the pharmacy bay. Same brand, wider audience.
The process — sharpen the identity, build the range, run the campaign
Identity refinement first: the wordmark, the colour territory, the logo system. Range architecture next: naming, SKU navigation, format hierarchy. Then packaging — front-of-pack and back-of-pack as a unified system that holds at shelf and in hand. Finally, campaign direction: photography, language and the world the brand lives in.
“The brands that move from cult to mainstream do it by sharpening the thing that made them cult in the first place. Not by smoothing it away.”
The outcome
The result is a Dr Pickles that reads as confidently in Chemist Warehouse as it does in an ink studio — the same character-led brand, a clearer range, and packaging built to hold at three metres and in the hand.
A Morice & Co project. This study shows the design transformation; we don’t publish third-party commercial figures.