Case Study: Grey’s Juices

I finally over­came my reser­va­tions about making video con­tent, and started on a series of case stud­ies. Turns out, I am quite ter­ri­ble at edit­ing. So now we’re blog­ging it. Welcome!

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My old friend asked me if I would take on a brand­ing project for his moth­er’s new juice busi­ness. I said sure, but advised him to focus on lock­ing down a supply of qual­ity bot­tles – I’d let him know when my sched­ule freed up. That didn’t happen for a month or so… 

So when I did find the time, I tried to pick up the con­ver­sa­tion with some vim, deliv­er­ing the con­cept he had casu­ally men­tioned for her sobolo drink.

It worked. Only one brother bucked the chorus of enthu­si­as­tic admi­ra­tion, by observ­ing that the red text would be hard to read on a bottle full of crim­son Bissap. I was embar­rassed to have over­looked this, but I wel­comed the con­struc­tive feedback.

Unfortunately, we didn’t move straight on to press. They sus­pected that their mother might want some­thing more con­ven­tional. Thankfully, I also do con­ven­tional. I have been a fan of con­ven­tional since I saw this xkcd poster.

I sug­gested, quite seri­ously, that we should double down on con­ven­tional, and call the drink ‘Bissap’. The brand­ing com­mit­tee came back with a casual yes, which I was happy to play along with. And then their mother, bless her heart, stepped in to change it. What to? Sobolo.

Unfortunately, she also asked us to put every­thing under the umbrella brand of ‘Grey’. ‘Grey Juices’; ‘Grey Sobolo’. My friend failed to dis­suade her, because he was the one who had started short­en­ing the family sur­name that way… I pro­posed that we could make sure that the ‘Grey’ didn’t read as an adjec­tive for the drinks, by dial­ing down the legibility. 

My friend loved the first con­cept, almost luxury in its tone. We had actu­ally printed a first batch when his mother humbly asked for some­thing a bit more approach­able. A bit more read­able.

This rein­forces the clas­sic moral: do not deal with mul­ti­ple levels of decision-makers. 

I had approved the lockup for ‘Sobolo’, and advised that we should empha­size the intent behind the name with jumbo text. So for the rest of the label design, I focused on explor­ing ways to sup­port the text with line art, both in the fore­ground and back­ground. (I started with the etch­ing style I am com­fort­able with, before real­iz­ing that a trop­i­cal line pat­tern would be much better. The ‘etched’ hibis­cus roselles went unused, because some­body thought they looked like marijuana…)

The jumbo text was sup­posed to wrap all around the bottle, for which I rec­om­mended a square form factor. This would make it easier to arrange the bot­tles on a shelf in a strik­ing way. In the busi­ness of store envi­ron­men­tal graph­ics, this is a tactic to improve a pro­duc­t’s footprint.

I faked a trendy 3D mockup of the first approved ver­sion for a pos­si­ble brand reveal. We revised the colour hier­ar­chy after the con­struc­tive-feed­back brother mused, “Why does this look like it con­tains alco­hol some­how?” Not sure why, but I could see what he meant. So we went with a more cheer­ful version.

We did a set of print sam­ples, and the con­cept proved effec­tive! Sobolo prod­uct done. 

Next, I had to find a way to reduce the print­ing over­head for all the fruit juices, by putting all the vari­ants on one label. Without it feel­ing cheap, of course.

This request totally fell off the table later, when the client decided to go all in on smoothie blends, where each blend would have all the ingre­di­ents on dis­play. I like this approach of one-label-fits-all though, saves a lot of trou­ble for a small producer.

My solu­tion was to make the list a fea­ture of the label, not an after­thought. Of course, we wanted to keep the jumbo text so that the juices would­n’t look weak next to the Sobolo. The client didn’t think little tick boxes would be enough to tell dif­fer­ent vari­ants apart, so the back­ground needed to be white. I decided to make that another feature. 

Was there a name for all the juices? The client said ‘Grey Juices, of course.’ I con­spired with my friend, and went big on another simple word: ‘Fresh’. We would empha­size this mes­sage with slices of fruit essen­tially float­ing in the middle of the bottle.

I have exper­i­mented a lot with print­ing tex­tures and dimen­sion­al­ity, so I know how easy it is to mix your visual metaphors. I restricted myself to flat colour, only using shad­ows where it made sense and offered real inter­est. The palette was chosen to sug­gest as many fruit blends as possible.

Another label com­pleted! My friend was happy, the client was sure we knew best; I made another mockup to celebrate.

And then the print sam­ples came through. The client had not noticed the labels were wrap­ping around the bottle. She con­fessed she was dread­ing the work of align­ing the stick­ers cor­rectly each time… Again, I blamed her son to hide my shame at skip­ping the con­sul­ta­tion stage.

She thought it might help to send me some Pinterest exam­ples of others doing ver­ti­cal label designs, which are trendy enough that I had fought the urge to rec­om­mend them. (Now I real­ize how they sim­plify the work for the client, I salute who­ever tried it first.)

I aimed to dis­sect the form of the label, with one cutout illu­sion for the brand name, and another for the main ingre­di­ents. (Poor label design in Ghana tends to crowd all the ingre­di­ents together; we stuck to a max­i­mum of four, neatly sep­a­rated in fruity wedges.)

Interestingly, I used Literata, the font on this site. The upright ital­ics are just so inter­est­ing to work with! The over­all effect see­saws between vin­tage gro­cery brand­ing, and the design lan­guage of modern wellness.

No mock­ups this time – I was jug­gling dead­lines on two other projects, one of which I may dis­cuss next… I was very grate­ful to hand things over to another good friend of ours, who has an excel­lent dig­i­tal print­ing ser­vice. A few weeks later, I had this pleas­ant sur­prise at a church gathering.

I got a set to take home as well, thanks to a very pleased client. I should have taken some photos as soon I got them in… When I checked the fridge the next day, the bot­tles had mys­te­ri­ously reduced in number.

It’s embar­rass­ing to think how few photos I have of my work in real life; that is one thing I hope to work on this year. I hope they all turn out this nicely. 

It’s inter­est­ing how the crazy projects always hold the most inter­est­ing lessons, and it is always nice to be work­ing with friends. As long as the work stays pro­fes­sional, the ran­dom­ness almost feels like a plus. I def­i­nitely enjoyed myself, and did not miss long email chains, pitch decks, and cor­po­rate pol­i­tics. Unless me blam­ing my friend counts as politics…

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They tell design­ers to only show their best, most pro­fes­sional work. This hardly qual­i­fies: I skipped project dis­cov­ery, took some uni­lat­eral deci­sions, and gen­er­ally treated it like a hobby project. Hopefully nobody thinks this is how I work with clients who aren’t a set of four crazy broth­ers that I have known for two decades… But if you do, and the crazi­ness actu­ally appeals to you, then we should def­i­nitely talk right away.