How Soft Services and DS & Durga made bar soap sexy

Persuasively selling a sensory body product online, where consumers can’t touch, smell, or test it, can pose a challenge for modern beauty and skincare companies. One way to do this well: make the product art direction, photography, and copy as tactile and evocative as possible.Cult DTC skincare company Soft Services and perfumery DS & Durga a are experts at doing just that. Now they’ve joined forces for a new Soft Services exfoliating buffing bar, and the creative assets and packaging are downright seductive.The bright magenta buffing bar is scented with one of DS & Durga’s best selling fragrances, Debaser (yes, named after the Pixies song). The bars, which come in a set of two for $44—which customers can also purchase in a set with a covered soap dish for $88—is Soft Service’s first fragrance collaboration. To mark the occasion, Soft Services went sensory and bold, with a product photography approach that will be familiar to brand die-hards but also pushes the creative direction in new ways, to evoke a heady feeling of summer ripeness from Debaser’s key scents, like fig, and make the product even more moody and provocative.[Photo: Soft Services]It’s worth noting are a few premium brands out there taking a similarly sensual creative approach: Equinox’s recent campaign with the creative agency Chandelier (“want indulgence, want it all”), Isayama French’s face gym (“beauty without restraint”), and Act + Acre, which was shot by the same photographer Soft Services has engaged, Chelsie Craig.“Selling scent online is a challenge, and that’s why we went with a direction in terms of the visuals, the photography, where it is so evocative,” says Soft Services founder Rebecca Zhou. A Pixies-inspired pink barThe Debaser bar itself is bright magenta, with a light purple wrapper printed with a surreal illustration by Lulu Lin depicting a fig and eyeball sliced in half. DS & Durga cofounder David Seth Moltz determined the pinky purple color palette for the fragrance and subsequent bar through synesthesia, or the ability to perceive of scents as colors, the co-founders tell me. “The color palette for the whole product launch— the packaging is purple and then the bar is kind of like a pinky purple—it’s based on how he thinks of the scent in that color range,” says DS & Durga cofounder Kavi Ahuja Moltz, adding that “the color palette for debaser is a provocative, juicy summer night scent.”[Photo: Soft Services]The scent has an involved backstory that contributed to the final visual look. It’s inspired by the first summer David heard the Pixies song by the same name, and the memories that surround that experience. “The wild shrill of Black Francis coming through the radio in the August heat. Ripe fig, iris, coconut milk, tonka and dry blond woods,” reads the most prominent description on the fragrance product page. DS & Durga seeks to conjure up emotional connections, as much as signature scents. (As do many perfumes; you only need to watch a single Miss Dior commercial to get that the house is really selling an idea.) This backstory plays on in the buffing bar itself. Photographer Chelsie Craig, who shot Soft Services’s banana buffing bar campaign, and has shot campaigns for the sexual wellness company Maude and the high fashion brand Loewe, used high key black backdrop photography with high contrast spotlighting to create a sense of moodiness and luxury. The use of props with mixed textures, like a ripe fig dripping over a bar, or squished between two pieces of a broken bar, build a sense of visual tension and emphasize the bar’s scent and form in a tactile way.[Photo: Soft Services]Evoking five senses through one: SightDS & Durga sells its product in its four brick and mortar stores, wholesale, and online, which David called a “hefty” part of its business. Soft Services is still mostly direct to consumer, although it partnered with Sephora in February and is now in about half of its 300 stores. With this in mind, I asked Soft Services founder Rebecca Zhou how she approaches the challenge of selling scents online. Referring to the photo of the split bar with the fig, she says, “You can really see the microcrystal texture of the buffing bar which is what gives it its strong exfoliating power, but you’re also seeing this juicy ripe fig that gives you a sense of what the product might smell like.” Zhou notes that in another photo, the coconut the bar sits within has a ragged edge rather than smooth cut. “That speaks to the hardcore irreverent nature of the scent,” she explains. [Photo: Soft Services]“Since day one, this has been our thing,” says David in reference to evoking sensory experiences online. “We are curators of unexpected beauty. That’s who Kavi and I are.” David likens DS & Durga’s fragrances to a record, and his descriptions as liner notes. “We’re providing all these different stories that you can enter in your nose,” says David. “You can see that on the website. There’s a playlist on Spotify. There’s images, there’s my poetic descriptions, there’s my liner notes of why I made it. So, there’s a lot of information before you commit.”The collaboration was also a way for DS & Durga to test bar soaps, a category it is considering expanding further into. Soft Services, which launched in 2021, also plans to launch more collaborations this year as a way to widen its customer base. So, how many have committed? Zhou didn’t disclose a specific number of bars sold, but says “we’ve been surprised at how fast it’s moving.” 75% of the soap dishes have sold out.