Fresh Cup Magazine, providing specialty coffee and tea professionals with unique insight into the trends, ideas, products and people that shape their world.
Issue link: http://freshcup.epubxp.com/i/48160
LINK TO THE SOURCE: Rishi Tea offers a window into where its teas come from with pictures of tea's origins on its packaging. frequent sales and repeat customers that come along with "everyday use" teas. "It's tough," says Sara Holby, co-founder of Ajiri Tea, a wholesaler special- izing in teas from Kenya. "We want our tea to be a special product, but like every company, we want to sell as much as we can." Another potential downside to design-heavy packaging is that the item can be seen as something that, once given, will sit on a shelf because it's seen as something to look at, not to use. Finally, there is a risk that serious consumers of tea—the ones who spend the most money in the cat- egory and have the most influence over others—will think that the flash and style are being used to com- pensate for an inferior blend in the box. So how does a tea company avoid being perceived as all style and no substance? It helps to present a clear identity as a brand, using all the aforemen- tioned elements—a clear logo, effective but not dominant verbage and eye-catching design. It's a model followed by Rishi. "We try to consistently brand our product and make sure that it is recogniz- ably Rishi," says Kim. "A Rishi Tea package should link the consumer to the origin and the inspiration of the tea, so we use cultural and artistic design to give the consumer a feeling of place and of the energy that the tea represents." For Rishi, that concept also expands to the materials used in its packaging, which must contribute to the design while also maintaining freshness. "There is a fine balance that we must always strive to meet," says Kim. "How can we create a package for our natural and organic teas with materials that are eco-friendly? We test eco-friendly packag- ing that can keep tea fresh and meet with our quality standards." At Ajiri Tea, Kenya is the focus. Ajiri means "to employ" in Swahili (which, alongside English, is one of Kenya's two national languages), and the compa- ny's mission is to create employment for the people of western Kenya. Fittingly, Kenya and its resources are recurring themes throughout Ajiri's packaging: The labels are made using dried bark from banana trees, and the company employs local women to hand-cut the bark and then design unique labels for its different offerings. "I think our package design really communicates the whole mission of what our company is," says Holby. "The labels are handmade by Kenyan women, the tea itself is Kenyan, and I think it's important that we tie it all together. We didn't want a tin that was the same as everyone else's but with a different label on it. We wanted to change the base of the package, and I think it makes our product really stand out." THE GOLD STANDARD Design is not simple, and there is not a single design PERSONAL TOUCH: Ajiri Tea's labels are made from bark cut by women in Kenya, the source of Ajiri's teas. style that will work for every company. Creating a rec- ognizable brand with information-rich material and a sense of quality and depth is the gold standard. As Kim of Rishi Tea says, "We need to think of ourselves as storytellers to create something meaningful to the customer that chooses to drink premium tea." Hewitt of Tea Forte puts it another way: "Tea is an experience, and we have all these different senses—taste, smell, visual, feel, so we experience things in multidimensional ways," he says. "They all matter and need to be taken into account with presentation." FRESH CUP MAGAZINE #!