Ceylon Tea

Stassen is a Sri Lankan tea giant, providing a versatile tea range across 80 countries and 5 continents, selling as bulk, tea bags, packaged teas and speciality packs. Founded in 1977 they are one of few tea companies allowed to express the Cylon lion on their packs, legitimately providing full leaf pure Cylon tea of the highest quality.

Stassen came to us with an understanding that they needed help, they came with an open mind and willingness to embrace a new and exciting brand for their tomorrow. From brand strategy through to brand creation, packaging design across 48 SKUs, copywriting and final artwork. A 12 week process that realised an exciting and vibrant rebrand.

Challenges
This was a great fun project, met with complete professionalism from both the client and Garden team, to be honest, it was a very smooth project with a happy client. The challenges were few, although the shear amount of SKU’s and the complex flavours, as well as all the copywriting required across every pack was a big task, but handled with care and consideration, delivered smoothly.

Approach
We followed our standard branding packaging design process and methodology, starting with sector research and benchmarking, demographic expectation, market gap, purpose and positioning, typical consumer behaviour, pack environments, community, ritualistic or ceremonial processes of tea drinkers, the brand story, and then through our three stage design process. The result of which helped provide the client with confidence in the decisions provided, always being fully aware of the opportunity and the competitive environment.

‍

Tea is a rather loverly product, sitting at the hearts of many cultures for hundreds, and in some cases thousands of years, always associated with calm moments of gentle community or contemplation, a healthy option drawn from nature itself. It was with this in mind that we decided to create a graphically pleasing pattern that reflects nature in a modern way, and lots of different logo marks each hand drawn to reflect nature inside.

The end packaging result was deliberately picking up on flavour cues for each pack, each pack uses a unique illustration which wraps around the outside of the carton, the style of both these elements delivers a colourful, relevant and striking shelf presence, encouraging the consumer to explore further, while delivering clear content flavour cues. The design follows through to the inside too, with brand messages written on the inside similar to the original ‘last leaves left’ from yesteryear papers.

We created a copy line of ‘Mother nature brings us perfection’ Stassen brings you…’which always prefixed the name of the product.

Technical
We designed the pack outer, inner, tea bag envelope and tab. Using foils and die stamps to build a luxury tea design, the print wrapped accurately around the pack, matching colour gradients and patterns. The ranges were classics such as black teas, green teas, earl greys, infused, English breakfast teas, Irish breakfast teas, Ceylon, Pure Ceylon, Chai, Assam, Jasmine, organic, premium, cinnamon, strawberry, blueberry, apple, peppermint, lemon and honey, lemon and many more.

‍

Results
The end result is a bright, warm and really rather beautiful pack range, a range that not only set new standards for tea packaging, but also managed to clearly define between complex ranges and sub categories. 

Reflection
We love this project, it was intense but fun, it tested our project management skills as well as our multi range and brand / pack architecture skills, the resultwe think speak for themselves – bright, fun, warm, friendly, unique and smart.

‍