Happy Wholefoods is a new company, loyal to organic, quality whole foods and nature's remedies. I was commissioned by them to design the packaging of their new product family of high quality, Certified Organic Mushroom Extract Powders.Their Mushroom Extract Powder is a superior, powerful superfood that promotes health, enhances the function of our immunity system and has anti-inflammatory and anti-ageing effects.
The family consists of 5 products in powder form:
-Power Potion (Supercharged Blend of 8 Organic Mushroom Extracts)
-Health Hero (Organic Chaga Extract)
-Stress Shield (Organic Reishi Extract)
-Brain Brew (Organic Lion's Mane Extract)
-Energy Enhancer (Organic Cordyceps Extract)
Each mushroom extract focuses on specific benefits for the body, highlighted by their name and caption. The product family was planned to expand shortly after, with capsules version of the powders and sachets for the perfect on-the-go solution, so this is something that we needed to take into consideration.
The founders had a premium product on their hands, as their powder is considerably better compared to most other powders in the market. Instead of visualising this as a simple, dark coloured design (usual solution to showcase quality products) they wanted a happy, colourful packaging design, with some special effects that would bring up the main info and indicate superiority in a subtle way.
The product was initially planned to launch on Amazon FBA, followed by health stores and shops after a few months, so we had to design the products, keeping in mind both markets' qualifications. The packaging would be jars with stackable, raw wood lids, to achieve reusable, earthy packaging. The founders also added an extra touch, a small wooden spoon, that would hold the exact dosage needed per day - a quantity quite small to be measured with a normal spoon. To be able to include all the necessary info, we needed a detailed manual and an outer box that would hold all items together. Highlighting the branding as much as possible, while still keeping it aesthetically pleasing, was important to the founders, so we decided to engrave the logo on both the wooden lid and the spoon handle.
When it came to the box, manual and label artwork, Power Potion was the first product to be released in the market, so it was the first product that was designed. The next step was to match the 4 individual mushroom boxes to Power Potion. To make sure that we could compare the best way possible, I presented all the options on mock up versions, starting with the Reishi and Chaga products first. Even from this first round of the design drafts, we had settled on the type of artwork we were all in favour of: A seamless background of mushroom illustrations, with or without additional colours. For the colourful versions, we selected 4 diverse, bright colours from the mushroom universe and appointed each one to the 4 mushrooms, using the Psychology of Colour.
During the 2nd round of design drafts, and once we decided on the motifs we were all happy with, we explored all the possible ways to combine the illustrations and the colours on monochromatic or 2-colour packages. We tried the same motif for all 5 packages and also different motif per mushroom, with more or less use of copper foil effect.
Till today, the first version remains our preferred direction. The client, however, found it less differentiated than desired, so they decided to go with version 2. The last step was to adapt all 4 illustrations as to have a similar amount of the beige background colour and to have brighter colours, well distributed in the space.
As the final product specifications where unknown to this stage, we didn't have specific sizes for the jar, and therefore for the box and the manual.Once we had them and we were ready to proceed with the rest of the designs, we realised that the jar for the individual mushrooms was much shorter than expected, with about half the size of the label we initially had in mind. For this reason we kept only the absolutely necessary information on it, and tried a landscape approach, as opposed to a portrait one.
You can see the final result for all the items for 3 out of the 5 products below - project to be updated once the other 2 individual mushrooms are released in the market.
