Design Agency: Dinamo
Designer: Ida Ekroll
Illustrator: Peter-John de Villiers (theshallowtree)
Project Type: Commercial work
Location: Norway

Epleslang is an apple juice that is hand picked from private gardens and produced locally in Oslo. The product has both an environmental and socially responsible profile in that it is extremely local and employs people with disabilities that are too often excluded from the workforce. Through working with people with impaired abilities, the company wants to demonstrate to employers and to the general public the value all people have for the employment sector.

Being a social entrepreneur, Epleslang focuses on creating a work environment that empowers people with physical, psychological or social challenges and give them a sense of accomplishment. Consequently, they gave us three important mandates:

1. They needed to tell their story on the bottle
2. Labels that the apple pickers themselves could affix on the bottles
3. Beyond promoting sale, the new design needed to recruit apple pickers and garden properties, in order to grow the business.

In addition to creating an attractive design and story, we wanted to facilitate an intuitive work process for the workers. We created a package design that could be manually affixed. This gave us the opportunity to work with different elements than normal. The outside of the bottle is illustrated with an apple tree drawn by Peter-John de Villiers of byHands. The illustration frames the typography, which creates a scalable system with regards to new cities and products. A simple A4 format has been used and the goal is that the paper can be different off-cuts and leftovers in order to minimize use of resources.

High quality, made by humans has been an important design cue. Epleslang has an important story to tell. We therefore gave them a large surface to do that on the back side of the label.