Starpack Brief: Luxury Gift Packaging – Family Range of Cans for Teas or Coffees

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 speciality tins. 

This brief is to develop a new, exciting and beautiful family range of at least three tins for teas or coffees.   Students are invited to create a fictitious brand targeting the quality retail sector, including retail outlets spanning duty free areas at airports and higher end, high street stores such as John Lewis, Selfridges and M&S. The range is to be designed primarily for purchase as a gift pack. 

Entrants will need to develop the branding to use across the range and the secondary metal packs. 

Background 

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’ve 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. 

Points to Consider 

• Marriageability as a set of three. 
• Metal offers great scope for creative design using different finishes including: 
  • print finishes; 
  • varnishes – high gloss, matt, crackle finish; 
  • use of colour; 
  • bare metal; 
  • embossing and debossing. 
• Reusability and storage of the secondary pack. 
• Shelf impact. 
• Marriage with other components eg. labelling and presentation. 
• Scope to tell a story. 
• To meet food standards, the contents (tea, coffee or infusion) must be sealed separately in a foil bag and presented in the secondary pack (set of three tins). 

Materials to be used 

The set of tins must use tinplate as the core element, but 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.