A category icon since 1863, restaged for a generation that has never bought it, without losing the customers who have bought it all their lives.
The brief
Bourjois Little Round Pot has been a category icon since 1863. Highlight London was briefed to refresh its codes while keeping the heritage intact, and to extend the franchise into new powder formats and a new shade language. The pot had to feel current to a shopper discovering Bourjois today and unchanged to the one who has kept it in her bag for decades.
The constraint
Heritage products punish redesign. Change too much and the object stops being itself; change too little and the refresh is invisible. The round silhouette and the "depuis 1863" cue are the equity, so both were fixed from the start. Everything else had to earn its place: the typography, the colour system for new shades, the way the pot appears in campaign imagery. The work also had to run across a mass-distribution footprint in Europe, with the artwork adapted for each market.
The decision
We kept the silhouette and the date, then refined the typography for clearer legibility on shelf, where the pot is small and the fixture is busy. The shade language was rebuilt so that new powder formats could join the family with the same logic, a name and a colour code that read at a glance. Around the object, we built a campaign visual system that pairs the pot with high-attitude character casting. The pack stays archival; the world around it moves. That split is what lets a heritage product feel contemporary without touching its identity.
The result
Little Round Pot continues to anchor Bourjois' powder category across European mass distribution, with the new artwork in market and across every touchpoint, from shelf to social. The franchise now has a clear way to add formats and shades without a new design each time.
What we took from it
On a heritage hero, the design question is what to leave alone. The answer decides the rest. We now start every heritage brief by naming the two or three elements that stay fixed, and the work becomes faster and braver from there.
