• by Sarah Mahoney  @mahoney_sarah, December 16, 2013

In a campaign intended to show off the natural pigments in its lip products and encourage women to layer different colors, Burt's Bees is flexing its flower power. 

For the second go-round of its “Nature Knows Color” campaign, the Durham, N.C.-based company hired Singapore petal artist Fong Qi Wei, who painstakingly dissembled more than 300 flowers, and then reassembled them to create a new print and digital campaign.

“We’re constantly trying to find new ways to bring colors to life, and with this, we got very fortunate,” says creative director David Baldwin, whose Baldwin& spearheaded the effort. The idea is that combining two colors results in richer, more complex hues.

So the artist combined the petals of roses, hydrangeas, lilies, daisies and peonies. Each image took five hours under hot lights to complete, and had to be finished before petals began wilting.  

The campaign supports Burt’s Bees lip line, including Lip Gloss, Lip Shimmer, Lip Shine, and Tinted Lip Balm, are 100% natural. The brand is owned by Clorox, which says product innovation in lip products helped drive double-digit volume growth in its most recent quarterly results. Currently, Baldwin tells Marketing Daily, there are 41 shades in the four product lines. Crayons, set to launch soon, will add an additional six petal-powered shades. “So many women are looking for an elusive shade, so the idea is that they can accomplish this by layering,” he says. “We want to inspire women to be creative with their lip color, expressing their personality through layering.”

While its target includes women between the ages of 18 and 34, he says the bullseye is aimed at 29-year-olds. 

The print ads are running in women's magazines, including Elle, Glamour, InStyle; Shape, Women’s Health, Fitness; O, and Real Simple; as well as People and Us Weekly. Online animated banners are running on beauty and wellness sites. (Pedone in New York is the print agency;  AKQA, San Francisco handles digital.)