Sheet 05 — Packaging & Manufacture

KAILO HERO-14
Refillable Vessel

A 50ml luxury skincare vessel designed for KAILO Wellness Medispa: a frosted glass jar with an airless pump and a replaceable product tub, so the housing is kept and only the cream is replaced. Documented end to end — seven parts, full drawings, manufacturing routes and a costed bill of materials.

Role: Product Design & DFM
Software: SolidWorks
Context: KAILO × QUT industry brief
Year: 2022

Render of the hexagonal KAILO HERO-14 vessel: frosted glass base with gold branding and a Karuun rattan lid.

01 / 07

The Brief

KAILO Wellness Medispa needed a new vessel for HERO-14, their flagship 50ml cream. The brief set hard constraints: it had to be refillable, timeless, sustainable, dispense without the user putting fingers in the product, and incorporate Karuun — a rattan-based material the brand wanted represented. A target unit cost of around $6 sat over the top of it.

KAILO sells to a 28–40 demographic with disposable income, positioned in the quadrant that is both genuinely luxury and thoughtfully sustainable — so the vessel had to earn its price without resorting to disposable packaging.

02 / 07

Research & Ideation

I started from KAILO's brand language — luxurious, elegant, timeless, elevated, radiant, with gold as a recurring accent — and the wider trend in face and body creams toward simple forms and neutral, earthy palettes. Early ideation explored faceted, twisted and grained vessel forms before the hexagonal profile was chosen.

The form settled on a single clear quartz crystal — a stone associated with healing, mirroring what the HERO-14 product claims to do. The airless pump reinforces it: the mechanism physically elevates the product out of the vessel, which is KAILO's own key word.

Report page showing hand-drawn ideation of faceted, twisted and grained vessel forms alongside the materials rationale.

Early ideation & material rationale

03 / 07

Materials & CMF

Frosted glass (eggshell #fdf8f5) forms the main housing — chosen to read as crystal quartz, to hide the mechanism inside, and because weight reads as quality in the hand. Glass is also infinitely recyclable.

HDPE takes every internal plastic part: durable, and recyclable with 25–100% pre-consumer content. Karuun — a rattan-based material — is inlaid into the lid in two finishes, Karuun Shine on the top face and Karuun Stripe around the side, with a gold band (#be9c6d) carrying the KAILO 'K' indent. Because rattan only thrives in biodiverse forest and is hand-harvested, specifying it works toward 10 of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Close-up of the lid: gold band with the KAILO K indent, Karuun Shine rattan top face and Karuun Stripe side.

Lid CMF — gold band & Karuun

Render of the frosted hexagonal glass vessel with screen-printed gold branding.

Frosted glass vessel

04 / 07

Seven Parts

The vessel resolves into seven components. Six are custom; only the airless pump mechanism is specified off the shelf. Every plastic part passed a draft analysis for injection moulding.

Exploded assembly

Bill of materials drawing sheet listing all seven parts with material, finish, mass and colour.

Bill of materials Open PDF ↗

1 — Vessel lid

Render of the airless pump bracket ring.

2 — Pump bracket

3 — Dispense plate

4 — Pump mechanism

Render of the clear airless pressure puck.

5 — Pressure puck

6 — Refill tub

Render of the frosted hexagonal glass vessel.

7 — Glass vessel

Close-up of the airless pump seated on the glass vessel with the lid removed.

Pump in situ

05 / 07

The Refill System

This is the part that makes the vessel worth keeping. The glass housing, lid and pump stay with the customer; only the inner HERO-14 tub is replaced. Remove the lid, twist off the airless pump, pull the empty tub out and click a new one in — then twist the pump back on.

Customers can buy a replacement pod online, or bring the vessel into KAILO's Brisbane store to have the existing pod cleaned and refilled. At end of life the whole product is 100% recyclable, and the glass jar and lid repurpose cleanly as a ring dish or candle holder.

Refill step one: removing the lid from the vessel.

Remove the lid

Refill step two: twisting off the airless pump mechanism.

Twist off the pump

Refill step three: removing the empty tub and replacing it.

Swap the tub

06 / 07

Manufacture & Cost

Every custom plastic part is injection moulded in HDPE with an MT-11010 finish; the glass vessel is press-and-blow with screen-printed gold branding. I sourced quotes against Australian moulders — BC Plastics, Dienamics, Tooltech and Polyman among them — and priced tooling and unit cost through ICO Mold at 5,000, 20,000 and 100,000 unit runs.

At 5,000 units the vessel lands at $11.49 per unit including amortised tooling, falling as volume rises. Hand-assembly was timed at 1 minute 14 seconds per vessel across the four sub-assemblies — the Karuun inlay being the slowest step at 40 seconds.

Every moulded part was checked with a draft analysis before the drawings were signed off — green faces pull cleanly from the tool, so anything flagged got re-angled first.

Draft analysis of the refill tub showing all faces pulling cleanly.

Draft analysis of the pump bracket ring.

Draft analysis of the hexagonal vessel lid.

Draft analysis — injection moulding

Pump sub-assembly

Assembly render showing the tub and pump combined.

Tub & pump

Completed vessel

07 / 07

Drawings & Boards

A seven-sheet A3 drawing set covers every part, plus the assembly and bill of materials. The two A2 presentation boards were the client-facing deliverable.