Usually, you put a Babybel inside your bag. Anya Hindmarch would like you to hang one from the outside instead.
The British designer has turned the familiar little red cheese into a luxury leather bag charm, reproducing the Babybel Original wrapper in shiny red goatskin, complete with printed and embossed details and a gold-tone clasp. It measures just four centimeters across, roughly the size of the real thing, and costs $275.
No cheese included.
The Packaging Is The Product
The collaboration is part of Anya Brands, Hindmarch’s long-running collection that turns familiar supermarket and household products into collectible fashion accessories.
Heinz ketchup, Coca-Cola, KitKat, Stabilo and other everyday brands have already received the treatment. The collection has become recognizable enough in its own right that examples now sit in the permanent collection of London’s V&A Museum.
Babybel feels almost designed for it.
The product already has everything a fashion accessory needs: a distinctive shape, one dominant color and packaging that can be recognized from across a room. Hindmarch barely needs to reinterpret anything.
Replace wax with leather.
Add a gold clasp.
Charge considerably more.
The joke works because the Babybel still looks unmistakably like Babybel.
When Brand Codes Become Collectibles
For Bel, this is less random than it first appears.
The company has been looking for ways to move its brands beyond food and into fashion, lifestyle and culture. Earlier this year, Babybel worked with Timbaland on miniature vinyl records inspired by its famous red wax.
Both ideas start in exactly the same place: not with the cheese, but with everything surrounding it.
That is increasingly interesting territory for brands with genuinely distinctive products. Heinz recently turned its ketchup packet into luggage with Herschel. KFC has transformed its crispy coating into a textile. Crocs has moved the holes and Jibbitz system from footwear onto phone cases.
None of those ideas requires inventing a new visual language.
They work because the existing one is strong enough to survive being moved somewhere completely different.
Babybel may be one of the purest examples yet.
Take away the cheese entirely and people still know exactly what they are looking at.
You can eat a Babybel in a few bites.
Apparently the wrapper is worth $275.
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