Project
Sal
Packaging
Art direction
Photography
2026
The brief
Sal was started by Marina Ferreira, whose family has worked a salt pan on the Aveiro lagoon for three generations. She began selling bath salt at the town market in 2021, and by 2025 had six products in 140 shops and spas around Portugal. The jars looked like every other natural cosmetics brand, all leaves and script, and shops shelved them beside products made a thousand kilometres from any sea. Sal wanted packaging that said where it came from, and photographs to prove it, before its first export order to Spain in spring 2026.
The idea
Every label says what the product is in two words at most, in the deep blue of the lagoon, above a band of the pink the brine turns as it evaporates. And instead of a studio, we shot the range in the family’s own pans in August, the week of the harvest: half buried in salt, on the cracked mud of an empty pan, at the edge of a pink pool.
Bath salt
Coarse salt from the last harvest in a wide glass jar, with nothing added but a little rosemary oil.
Scrub and soap
A salt scrub in aluminium tins that shops refill, and a soap made with the pan’s own brine, wrapped in paper.
Hand cream
A hand cream made for the people who rake the salt, and sold to everyone else.
The pans
We shot in August, the week of the harvest, in the family’s pans on the lagoon outside Aveiro.
What changed
The new range reached shops in February 2026, and the photographs did the selling: two Spanish spa chains got in touch after seeing the salt-pan shoot online. The family now runs summer visits to the pan, with the shoot’s pictures on the wall of the salt shed.
Credits
Okapi: Beatriz Correia (art director), Ana Pires (packaging), Marta Lobo (copy)
Sal: Marina Ferreira (founder), Paulo Ferreira (salt master)
With: labels printed in Aveiro; photography by Rafael Costa in the Ferreira salt pan
