Covered in Bees!

Design: Ollie Langridge
Project Type: Produced, Commercial Work
Client: Ollie’s Honey Company
Location: Leeds, UK
Packaging Contents: Honey
Packaging Substrate / Materials: Glass jar, paper label, card swing tag
Printing Process: Letterpress and digital printing

After spending over a decade working with agencies to create branding and packaging for other companies, designer (turned beekeeper) Ollie Langridge decided to become his own client – creating the branding and packaging for his new venture ‘Ollie’s Honey Company’.

Wanting to stay away from many of the usual stereotypes found in honey packaging, Ollie found inspiration for the design in his experiences as a new beekeeper, and mainly his overwhelming feeling of being covered in bees!.

The design mixes Ollie’s love of beekeeping, typography and buying stuff off ebay – using a beautifully random selection of woodblock letter Bs from Ollie’s collection to cover the honey labels.

Working with a local print-maker to letterpress the different letter forms, Ollie then scanned and resized them to fit and added a swing tag featuring the company’s simple, bold branding.

Unlike the stuff you find in supermarkets, the taste of raw honey can change from year to year, depending on a number of different things, such as the weather and which flowers are in bloom etc. So to reflect the uniqueness of each year’s harvest, Ollie plans to create a different label design each year.

Ollie’s business might be starting small, but it’s already doing well – with this years batch of honey selling out completely and orders already coming in for Spring 2019… time to start working on next year’s design!

What’s Unique?
The design is unlike any honey packaging out there. It moves away from the usual stereotypes of hexagons and illustrated bees and focusses instead on the experiences and craft of being a beekeeper and a designer.

Just as beekeeping is a labour of love and a test of patiences, so is the art of letterpress – so it seemed like the perfect opportunity to mix these two passions together.