Hotel Tea Time & Red Box Wine: Packaging 10 Competition Entries

Whether you prefer a hot cup of tea or a rich glass of wine, drinks always taste better when they come in beautiful packaging. Today’s featured entries prove that!

Priority, a design firm from Sweden, had a grand time designing “A Grand Tea” (above) for their client, Grand Hôtel Stockholm, who they’ve been working with since 2011 creating and designing material that communicates the transition from an old hotel from 1874 to a modern hotel with an exciting heritage relevant for the 21st century. As the only five-star hotel in Scandinavia, the Grand Hôtel Stockholm offers several restaurants and a bar – The Cadier Bar – where guests can enjoy the Grand Hôtel Afternoon Tea experience. While guests have been able to buy the hotel’s tea to take home with them, Grand Hôtel wanted to update the design with a more conspicuous design for the newly introduced illustration concept. The illustration concept was created to de-dramatize the luxury hotel and to make it more approachable for a wider audience.

With this in mind, Priority and Creative Director and Illustrator Jan Vana created a set of illustrations for the new tea packaging, each capturing the ambiance and the interior of the Cadier Bar. The illustrations are a mix of dreamlike moments and factual things showcasing what it feels like to experience afternoon tea at Grand Hôtel. They include two different perspectives of the Cadier Bar – the larger is the café-like part with the color scheme inspired by the sand stone-colored walls and arches with people on a date, eating sandwiches, pastries, and scones and drinking a neverending flow of tea. The smaller packaging illustration focuses on the lounge chairs at the windows where guests sit for a long time, reading, talking, and winding down into the late afternoon with a cup of tea. The tea information label is hot stamped in gold and mounted afterward on each packaging. This solution enables various teas to be used with the same design but allows different labels colors to differentiate between teas.

The result is a playful and creative packaging that creates a product fit for kings and at the same time carries the Grand Hôtel brand in a strong and fun visual way. The packaging and the illustrations have become favorites among staff and everybody at Grand Hôtel.

Brandy company Germain-Robin began in 1982 as the unlikely union of two creative minds: Ansley Cole, a professor, and Hubert Germain-Robin, a cognac distiller. The two partnered to create the first California brandy that broke free from the constraints of cognac, crafting their liquor from traditional, alembic cognac stills, but using unconventional, flavorful, and complex California wine grapes. Embracing the rich tradition of hand-distillation while harnessing the potential of California wine, they set a new standard of excellence in brandy that has been recognized worldwide and is a tradition that continues today.

forceMAJEURE, an American design firm, was asked to rebrand Germain-Robin, staying true to the ethos of the founders while providing the quality and premium queues to make Germain-Robin the brandy of choice for connoisseurs. Emulating the core brand value of unembellished while still being uncompromising, forceMAJEURE chose to create a clean and straightforward look for “Germain Robin Brandy Redesign” (above). The logotype expresses the quiet and confident attitude of the brand: the name of the two founders are stacked and elegantly separated by a thin line, a quest for a perfect balance, the equilibrium between imagination and rigor in execution. The minimalist approach to the packaging of the two brandies follows the same philosophy: the California Alembic brandy has a humble white crafted paper label that notes the variant in red, and a precise description of the distillation and aging methods of the brandy. The XO variant has a minimalist black label, enhanced by a stamped print of a redwood cut, which was crafted by a local artist using an actual redwood tree cut and is an honest representation of their respect for the environment, artisanal methods, and the diligence of craftsmanship and detail.

To quench your thrist for more awesome Packaging 10 entries, check out the competition webpage at graphis.com.