Package Design | packagedesignmag.com

By Linda Casey

Choice Organic Teas was facing an image problem. The tea brand, which is owned by Granum Inc. (Seattle, WA), hadn’t significantly changed its packaging since it launched in 1989. As a result, the company was receiving a worrying compliment from new customers all too often.

“They were surprised to find out how good our tea tasted,” says Anne-Marie Phillips, head of sales and marketing. The feedback made it clear that consumers are won over by the product once they try it, but the problem was getting them to try it in the first place. Exacerbating the problem were changes in the tea market categories and their visual cues. “A more down-home look was effective in the early days,” Phillips says. “For better or worse, organic, natural, and fair-trade products are increasingly considered specialties.” The specialty food market demands a more upscale look.

Choice Organic Teas brought in The Hartman Group, which conducted multiple rounds of consumer focus groups and invited the brand’s graphics coordinator India Nagy to sit in on some of the research sessions. Nagy then used the feedback to create a common design architecture.
This architecture targets two primary markets identified by The Hartman Group’s research. “We have a pretty loyal following from people who are very activist oriented or are very health conscious,” says Nagy. “Another group is the ‘tea sophisticates,’ who are interested in having new experiences. This group likes to be educated about what they’re experiencing.”

This latter group, says Phillips, is a “larger, more mainstream audience” that represents a growth opportunity. Many of these consumers were introduced to premium teas through the ready-to-drink bottled tea market, but now see tea drinking as an intellectual and cultural experience.
As with any redesign, capturing a new market without alienating the current market creates a challenge. In this case, research showed that loyal customers were very familiar with the brand’s packaging–to the point that some of them couldn’t remember the brand name and identified the teas solely by the packaging.

“We wanted to make sure that the customers who already knew us and wanted us—those who chose us for their daily tea—would be able to recognize us right away,” Phillips says.