Often tea companies wish to fit into a perceived consumer lifestyle (beautiful woman having a Zen moment on a sunny morning) or they try to make their packaging feel like it belongs in the category aka "category camouflage”. By creating a radical, thoroughly modern departure for Helps® we stand off the shelf of sameness and attract new people to the brand and to functional teas themselves. Everyone suffers from the ailments Helps® alleviate, being gender neutral and function forward is important. 

The corresponding graphic sachet labels create curiosity with each steep. The idea being to get others to ask “what is it you’re drinking?” And have our tea drinker explain it for us.

The copy is a breath of fresh air for the category. Brevity and a nod to the ways Americans refer to taboo ailments, Helps® quickly demonstrates empathy without pretense. While infographic instructions show fast relief is afoot.

Each Helps® tea design pattern has a cross symbol as it’s foundation evoking it’s functional, positive, health benefit. The design pattern themselves are vibrant and kinetic, expressing the active/functional nature of each tea variety. The patterns themselves allow for each tea box to be an accessory to the moment. It’s not the kind of box that needs to be put away tight after use. It can sit on the counter for days looking beautiful.

Working with the existing packaging structure and die lines, we created new design, copy, tea sachets, a trade show booth and sales sheets to effectively sell the newly designed teas to mainstream and natural retailers across the country.

Helps® launched in March 2016 at Natural Products Expo West with high praise from prospective buyers and will hit shelves Summer 2016.

Functional teas are vertically oriented. Helps® was horizontal. By shifting to a vertical orientation, creating a stand-out design and empathic copy, Helps® will now tackle the American mainstream and natural grocers and retailers with gusto.

Since the 3rd century AD, humans have turned to functional tea as natural remedies for common ailments such as insomnia, lethargy, congestion, digestion, and constipation.

However, American organic grocery shoppers have a funny way of talking about what ails them. In speaking with women ages 25-65 who do the majority of their household's grocery shopping about functional tea as remedy, their answers were euphemistic and idiomatic. Sheepishly saying “when things aren’t moving, I turn to functional tea” with air quotes and pointing to their abdomen while referring to constipation. Helps® held an insight no one in the category had tapped before: talking about personal ailments is taboo, finding a solution is paramount. Our strategy: Function by any other name.

Helps® needed a package redesign and a strong US launch. The primary design challenge was that in the US functional teas are designed vertically. Originally, Helps® was horizontally designed. Moreover, the packaging felt pharmaceutical and foreign in the aisles of familiar functional tea brands.

They needed packaging that intrigued and broke away from conventions of tea competitors – specifically Traditional Medicinals and Yogi. Appropriating East Asian-inspired typeface and meditative design elements are stayed and the sea of sameness bored us. Helps® celebrated a new era of functional tea that’s steeped in 50 years of scientific research – it’s packaging needed to reflect the role functional tea plays in consumers lives.

Our objective was simple: reinvent the Helps® packaging to achieve US sales and distribution in major mainstream and natural retailers by changing expectations in functional tea package design.