503 - SB1 - Student Starpack Awards Luxury Family Range of Cans for Teas or Coffees

Introduction

In the UK, we drink over 60.2 billion cups of tea every year and some 55 million cups of coffee every day. The UK tea industry alone provides 0.02 per cent of the entire country’s annual turnover. However, we have come a long way since instant coffee or straight-up builder’s tea were our go-to choices. Tea infusions with exotic ingredients and additional health benefits are increasingly popular and with the café culture boom, nearly a fifth of the population visits a coffee shop on a daily basis. Consumers want that premium tea and coffee experience in their homes. The purchase of premium, organic, ethically-sourced and rare varieties of teas and coffees by UK homeowners is on the rise.

A wide range of teas, coffees and infusions from every corner of the world are now sold as gift items or decorative containers for the home. Rare blends, single origin mixes and infusions are presented and kept fresh in beautiful produced speciality tins.

The Brief

To design and develop a new, exciting and eye-catching range of at least three tins for either teas or coffees. Students will need to create a fictitious brand targeting the quality retail sector, including duty free areas at airports and the higher-end retailers such as John Lewis, Selfridges and M&S. This new range is to be designed primarily for purchase as a luxury gift pack. Metal offers great potential for creative design solutions with not only embossing and debossing but also the high quality of print finishes that can be achieved with colour, varnishes and bare metal.

Consider when designing your range (minimum 3 in range) marriageability as a set of three and that the labelling, graphics and overall presentation ensure they are a family of luxury products.

When developing your designs consider re-usability of the tins for a secondary use within the home. To meet food standards, the contents (tea, coffee or infusions) would, if going into production, be
sealed separately in foil bags and presented in the secondary pack.

Points to consider

• Creative use of tin
• Marriageability as a set of three luxury tins
• Innovative use of decorative and graphic elements
• Re-usability as a secondary pack
• Shelf impact
• Consumer appeal as luxury gift packaging

Materials to be used

The set of tins must use tinplate as the core element but your models can be made of any
appropriate material to represent the metal components. Similarly, any appropriate material can be used to represent the tin contents.

I am going to carry this brief out as my main one as I believe it involves enough substantial work. Another reason for choosing this to be my big project is that I am highly interested in packaging design and hope to go into that area of design when I graduate.