Take a Peek: Good Sweets Inspiration

I have a confession to make. I love Valentine’s Day. I know. I know! It’s a Hallmark holiday and you don’t need a day to remember to celebrate the people you love… but how lucky are we to get the opportunity to do so anyways.

My family celebrates Valentine’s Day (or Happy Hearts Day, as my daughter so sweetly refers to it) with a small garden party. We gather in the backyard for brunch to enjoy each other’s company and good weather. A staple for this, of course, is exchanging boxes of Sweethearts to share sweet nothings with each other. I hold such fond memories of my daughter giggling over a pile of hearts to find the exact message to share with another- just as I had done at her age, and as we all have at some point or another.

When I sought to create a Valentine’s offering from the studio, I looked no further than my own backyard & nostalgia- Good Sweets was a natural extension of those beautiful garden mornings.

For two years now Good Mud has recreated the iconic pastel Sweethearts into wearable porcelain keepsakes. You may be surprised to find though, that my favorite part of Sweethearts isn’t the candies themselves (they’re a very close second), but rather the packaging. I’d love to share with you two vintage packaging designs from the Sweetheart’s vault which heavily inspired the creation of the popular Good Sweets packaging.

This early 1970’s packaging design is iconic. It features a delicate laced heart window, a soft baby pink wash, and velvety red accents which to me, evokes a familiar comfort.

This softer, more delicate design is what inspired the packaging for Good Sweets. I wanted to capture the feel of a vintage valentine, and hoped that the packaging would create a sense of “completeness” around the final work by offering a space to scribe your sweetheart’s name. The timelessness of this design captured so effortlessly the same loving nostalgia I feel with my family in our garden.

A decade later, however, Sweethearts rebranded their packaging to this bolder 1983 design. The striking colors, sweeping lines, and color-blocked aesthetic took the packaging from it’s softer earlier days, to something which gave way for a more modern take. It was around this time that Sweethearts began to offer phrases like “Fax Me” to appeal to a growing audience.

More recently, in an effort to stay current, Sweethearts has expanded their vernacular to include sayings like “Tweet Me”, “Text Me”, and have also expanded into other languages, finally offering a sweet “Te Amo” or “Mi Novia”. In this way I feel Good Sweets has honored the spirit of Sweethearts- communicating feelings of love & care for a modern audience.

You may not find “Fax Me” on a Good Sweets heart, but be on the lookout for phrases the capture the spirit of our time while honoring the inherit nostalgia that Sweethearts brings.

From my studio to you, Happy Hearts Day friend :-)