Supporting Motherhood One Cup at a Time
Rae’s Roots Tea Blends
A minute to refuel. A moment to nourish. Rae’s Roots is an all organic, superherb and adaptogen-based tea company with a mission to nurture women throughout their motherhood journeys. Woman and AAPI-owned.
After our successful collaboration on the Rae’s Roots Kickstarter campaign, founder Joanna Linton approached me to design packaging for her expanded tea line. She requested warm, illustrative designs that would sit seamlessly with the original tea blend box. Vibrant and playful, the finished pouch designs helped the product gain visibility on the shelves of major retailers, including Macy's and Walmart.
Role
Lead Creative
Freelance for Raes Roots 𝄪 2020
Deliverables
Iconography & Illustration
Packaging
Collaborators
Primary Branding: Sarah Grace Kivett
Photography & Styling: Stephanie DeFeo
The Iconography
Using the existing logo and packaging design as visual guidance, I developed a line and solid shape combination icon style for the tea’s ingredients and benefits to use across web, social and packaging. Rounded corners and stroke intersections keep things soft and inviting.
The Illustrations
The teas are accompanied by distinct illustrations that reflect the key adaptogens ingredients present in each blend. On the front of the packaging, these illustrations come together in a playful, symmetrical frame surrounding the tea’s name and description. The tea bags also carry over the illustrations more sparingly.
Similar to the icons, these illustrations use simple shapes filled with flat color and line detailing. It was certainly a challenge to simplify more complex plant life such as ginger, fennel and rooibos but several refinement drafts made the final results worth it.
The Packaging
Each motherhood blend has a resealable stand-up pouch containing sixteen tea packets. The pouch design strikes a balance between fun illustrations and clean typography, incorporating negative space to showcase the primary branding and top-level product information clearly. The back of the pouch includes standard nutritional facts and specific adaptogen benefits and brewing instructions, all complemented by corresponding icons. As a sweet surprise, we included positive, reaffirming messaging for mothers on the gusset.
For production, I curated Pantone palettes for each blend and set up the spec techpacks to hand off to the two printers. Unlike the pouches, the packets had a maximum of three colors for printing. To simplify and ensure consistency, Rae’s Roots primary gold and dark green, as well as the blend’s base color, were carried over to all packet designs.
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