Judge's comments:

Monday is a brand that has hit all the megatrends and sales targets around premiumization and affordable luxury - giving their target audience something to love and share with its super relevant and fresh feel.

Leaning on strong product design, Mondays packaging has been optimised for distinctiveness, colour blocking and smart thinking around impact. They have demonstrated to all of us what's possible from Aotearoa New Zealand. Challenging the biggest FMCG companies in the world, cutting through with bold branding and making it more affordable for young people to have more good design in their life

Description:

For a long time, achieving ‘exclusivity’ has been the goal for beauty brands. But by definition, that means someone is always left out. New Zealand-founded MONDAY Haircare is part of a more inclusive beauty movement—making salon-quality formulas widely available at an accessible price point.

We knew consumers were looking for an alternative to popular but tired supermarket haircare brands—something that not only performed, but that looked and felt premium, so they’d be proud to show it off in their bathroom and on their Instagram feed. Along with that, it had to have modern values—like being certified cruelty-free, fully recyclable, and conscious of ingredients such as SLS and parabens.

MONDAY was designed to cut through the clutter on shelf with a unique and sophisticated physical packaging solution. With a goal of disrupting the crowded mass haircare category, the approach to MONDAY’s packaging design was bravely minimal. It achieves a premium feel through a simple and uncomplicated aesthetic.  

The resulting ‘MONDAY pink’ has not only strongly resonated with the targeted millennial/Gen Z demographic, but become synonymous with MONDAY’s brand identity. After just three years, the brand is stocked with more than 70 of the world’s biggest retailers including Walmart, Target, Amazon, Kroger, Tesco, CVS and Ulta Beauty, and is found in 24 countries and 30,000 doors.

MONDAY is also the #1 most-followed and most-liked haircare brand on TikTok, with more than 15 million likes on our content and more than half a billion views of the #mondayhaircare hashtag. The brand also has thousands of 5-star reviews and close to a dozen beauty awards. 

Through good design and a strong brand identity, MONDAY has achieved its goal of being cult haircare without the cult price tag.