Superior re-engineering.
The brand team at Clipper Teas came to us about a year ago with a brief to re-design their popular countdown calendar for Christmas 2022. This eye-catching compact calendar with 24 numbered tea bags is a big seller across Europe and the UK so the brand team were keen to maintain consistency with its appearance and functionality.
The 2021 pack had been designed to be hand-erected and filled with the tea bags in numerical order. This was a very time-consuming packing process, especially as it had a manual tab closure and four tamper seals. The brief was to re-design a pack that looked the same from the front, could be hand-filled from the side and would require fewer tamper seals. The volumes were high so these pack changes would lead to major cost savings on the packing line.
The Alexir Creative packaging team worked alongside their structural designers and sketched out five pack formats that fulfilled the brief but were sufficiently different to present back to the customer.
The selected pack was the ‘Triptych’ version whereby the pack was made up of three panels. From the front, the pack looked the same, however, on opening the front panel, a second panel is revealed to be an extra-long left wing. The original appearance and functionality were unchanged, but the pack had been sufficiently re-designed so that it no longer required so many tamper seals.
The timeframe from brief to production was six months in total which was a remarkable achievement by both parties involved, given the scarcity of board at the time.
The Clipper Tea Advent Calendar is designed to count down to Christmas with 24 cups of organic tea and infusions. In 2018 Clipper Teas were the world’s first tea company to switch to Plant-Based, Biodegradable, non-GM and unbleached tea bags. They are also constantly working on ways to be greener, from production to packaging. In 1994 they became the UK’s first Fairtrade tea company. They even helped to write the Fairtrade Standards. 25 years later Clipper is the world’s largest buyer of Fairtrade tea, supporting over 114, 000 producers and their families around the globe.
