Wedge’s Cocolab rebrand brings joy and dopamine to dental care — The Brand Identity – Home of the Greatest in Graphic & Brand Design

When Cocofloss launched in 2015, it carved out a peculiar niche: dental floss people actually got excited about. Founded by two sisters – Dr Chrystle Cu, a dentist, and Cat Cu, an artist – the brand’s textured, ‘loofah-like’ floss in flavours like confetti cake and chocolate quickly earned a cult following that extended to Gwyneth Paltrow’s goop and various beauty editors. But the founders’ ambition stretched beyond a single hero product, no matter how beloved.

The challenge wasn’t just expanding the product line. It was evolving Cocofloss into Cocolab – a complete oral care brand that could support an entire range whilst maintaining the cachet that made it special in the first place. Montreal and LA-based brand and design studio Wedge, co-founded by Design Director Justin Lortie and Creative Director Sarah Di Domenico, was brought in to orchestrate this transformation. “Cocolab was founded by a dentist and an artist who believe oral care and prevention starts with joy, not dread,” Di Domenico explains. “Working together, the vision became to build a world where joy crashes routine.” During an early workshop, the design challenge crystallised: create oral care products worthy of the MoMA store. This alignment between elevated design ambition and inherent playfulness set the course for everything that followed.

The resulting positioning – Your daily hit of dental dopamine – puts pleasure on equal footing with efficacy. It’s a bold stance in a category dominated by clinical claims and minty freshness. Rather than leading with dentist-designed credibility, Cocolab leads with feeling, trusting that the joy of the experience will drive the routine, and the routine will deliver the results. This ethos permeates the visual system. Where traditional oral care brands favour sterile whites and predictable blues, Cocolab embraces a vibrant, saturated palette that mirrors the brand’s adventurous flavours. Lychee and pineapple toothpaste. Floss in cara cara orange and chocolate. “The strategic role of colour is to deliver the emotion of enjoyment for oral care,” Di Domenico notes. “Shifting from a routine you ‘have to do,’ to one that makes you feel damn good.”

The design system walks a deliberate line between subverting category conventions and maintaining essential trust signals. “It’s not that the aesthetic is anti-dental. It’s just that it’s anti-dental in contrast to the ‘big toothpaste’ dental establishment: one-note, ultra clean, blue dominated, traditional,” says Di Domenico. To balance this vibrancy with credibility, Wedge paired an elevated serif with a clean sans serif, ensured clear messaging and call-outs, introduced symbols that speak to performance-related benefits, and prioritised ‘dentist-designed’ in the packaging hierarchy.

The packaging itself treats each product as part of what Cocolab calls the Smile Care System – beauty-inspired language for a suite of products designed to work together. “Our ‘10-step skincare,’ but simpler,” Di Domenico describes it. “Serious oral care, that’s beauty care.” This systemised thinking influenced the entire packaging architecture, creating cohesion whilst allowing each product to maintain distinct personality.

Colour serves a role beyond simple product differentiation. Each shade was chosen to match the sensory experience of its corresponding flavour, creating what Di Domenico describes as an inspiring “gotta try them all” feeling, particularly for the floss range. The illustration style reinforces this sense of discovery, inviting customers into a world that feels uniquely attractive compared to its counterparts in the oral care aisle.

The transformation from Cocofloss to Cocolab represents something larger than a rebrand or product expansion. It’s a calculated bet that oral care – one of the most habitual, autopilot categories in consumer goods – can be disrupted not through better ingredients or scientific claims, but through genuine pleasure. By treating the daily ritual of dental care as an experience worth designing for, rather than a chore to be endured, Cocolab positions itself as the standard-bearer for what Di Domenico calls “the next generation of dental brands.”

The success hinges on maintaining that delicate balance: elevated enough to justify mass-premium positioning, playful enough to honour the cult following that started it all, and credible enough that when Dr Cu promises these products will “rebuild your oral health and nurture your overall wellbeing,” customers believe her. In a category where most people buy the same products for years, Cocolab is banking on the idea that a little dopamine goes a long way.