Collaboration since 2021
The Brand
GYD is a Kyiv-based fragrance house working with essential oil blends and niche perfumery. Founded on the idea that scent is a tool for self-exploration, the brand positions itself at the thoughtful end of the independent fragrance market — a space where artisan perfume packaging and product philosophy are expected to be in alignment.
All GYD products are housed in glass. The brand’s visual identity is spare and typographic. What it communicates, from the first point of contact, is intention.
The Challenge
GYD came to S.Lab at the very beginning, at the idea stage. By that time, GYD’s founding team was already asking the question: what does the packaging need to be?
The functional requirement was clear. Glass vessels need reliable shock absorption in transit. The standard industry answer (moulded foam or plastic inserts) was not one GYD was prepared to accept. For a brand whose entire premise is built on natural raw materials and self-awareness, petroleum-based packaging would have been a contradiction at the point of unboxing.
“We didn’t want to enter the world at all without smart packaging,” says Mariia Havrysh, GYD’s founder. “So we were exploring different options.”
What GYD needed was a sustainable packaging solution that could perform like foam, read as premium and disappear without an environmental trace. Those three requirements, together, ruled out most of what the market offered. Responsible packaging for niche perfume at this level, both technically and philosophically, simply did not exist off the shelf.
The Solution
GYD found S.Lab through their own research and reached out to explore mycelium as a material. S.Lab’s mycelium-based packaging is grown from fungal root structures bound with agricultural substrate — a biological process that requires no fossil-fuel inputs, produces no toxic byproducts and results in a fully home-compostable, biodegradable packaging that returns to the earth at the end of life.
This is custom packaging for beauty products developed from the ground up. It is not an adapted generic format, but a 3D form engineered specifically for GYD’s glass geometry and transit requirements. It belongs to a new generation of innovative materials for beauty packaging: low-impact packaging that does not ask a brand to choose between performance and values.
Test runs were produced and refined. The process moved quickly.
“We made test shapes. Within a few months, we already had our first official run,” Mariia Havrysh recalls.
The final form, a clamshell case with precision-fitted cavities, delivers the shock-absorbing sustainable packaging that glass requires in transit, while presenting a surface texture entirely its own: dense, organic, somewhere between compressed stone and raw cotton. As a plastic-free fragrance packaging solution, it does not read as a sustainability compromise. It does not contradict the premium register of what is inside. It is, in the fullest sense, natural packaging: in material, in process and in the way it sits alongside the product it protects.
The Outcome
The packaging became, almost immediately, one of GYD’s most discussed brand elements.
“From that moment until today, it has been one of the most recognisable things associated with our brand, with GYD. Everyone always asks about it,” says Maria. “Some people don’t fully understand what this material actually is, so it drives a lot of curiosity and attention from customers.”
For an independent brand without a large marketing infrastructure, that customer-driven curiosity has functioned as an introduction mechanism — a conversation starter at the point of purchase that requires no additional communication effort from the brand itself.
There was also an unexpected outcome around end-of-life behaviour. GYD’s original intention was that the eco-friendly perfume packaging would do its job and then be composted. In practice, many customers keep it.
“We had an idea for packaging to do its function and then disappear, but some people, on the contrary, don’t throw it away — they find it so beautiful that they keep it as a kind of souvenir. Which, honestly, doesn’t quite align with the idea we started with, but it is fundamentally a huge part of GYD.”
On the question of perception, a critical concern for any niche house, the result has been consistent. This is a premium packaging solution that holds its own against any material in the fragrance market.
“It isn’t perceived as cheap or low-quality, quite the opposite. Our box design comes across as more premium than cardboard or anything else.”
The Partnership
The collaboration between GYD and S.Lab has been continuous since 2021. What began as a search for custom mycelium packaging has become a defining element of the brand’s identity — present in every product, referenced in every customer interaction and inseparable from what GYD is.
S.Lab develops home-compostable mycelium packaging for fragrance and beauty brands. Custom moulds are available from the early concept stage.
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