The Tea of Emotions

Design: Direction – Design & Branding Agency
Project Type: Produced, Commercial Work
Client: The tealicious land of Lili
Location: Vietnam
Packaging Contents: Tea
Packaging Substrate / Materials: Paper
Printing Process: Digital printing

Back to 2016, Lili was a brand new tea business in Hanoi, Vietnam, with the product lines mainly imported from England. From then until now, their target consumers are office lady or female who have a distinctive lifestyle and likely been studied or travel abroad.

Lili had a difficult question to solve: How to sell Western tea in a country where the citizens already had their own tea culture? They came to us with a hope to have nice packaging which could help them solve the question.

After a lot of research and thinking and fighting, we came up with a big idea: Lili did not sell normal tea, but the tea of emotion. We want to represent this product lines as a source of emotional support, a companion with the customers’ feelings – both positive and negative ones.

To visualize this message, the concept for 5 main packages was: one girl representing for one emotion appears in the front, surrounding her are images of flowers, fruits, leaves – the ingredients of each kind of tea.

• Fruit tea – A tea of joyfulness: A girl with a sweet smile on her face
• Black tea – A tea of melancholy: A girl with closed eyes, sad face
• Herbal tea – A tea for meditation: A girl with a relaxing and calm facial expression.
• Green tea – A tea of astonishment: A girl with surprising facial expression.
• Rooibos tea – A tea for a tough day: A girl with a determined look.

What’s Unique?
To illustrate the concept, our team decided to choose Art Noveau style for some reasons. Art Nouveau originated from Europe in the late 18th century. This art style was inspired by natural forms and structures, particularly the curved lines of plants and flowers. Additionally, it was used mainly for the theme of praising women. Considering all these features, there is no other art style can do a better job than Art Nouveau in illustrating Lili brand story and characteristics: a foreign tea brand targeting on women who love beauty and themselves.

Additionally, the package structure is different from the traditional tea package in Vietnam. There’s no need to have a bag covering outside, the package itself already looks like a gift. Our idea behinds this is that choosing Lili tea is like choosing a gift for yourself – something will accompany and support your emotions.