Brand Opportunity

We started researching this journey by immersing ourselves in the world of tea products, discovering all the consumer and market research we could find, and researching in national tea consuming cultures and visiting local tearooms, so we can learn about ZenTea’s competitors and potential customers at the beginning.

One tearoom launched in Thames town in China, which is a British style town in Shanghai, and has an estimated 1,800,000 visitors annually (China tourism report). Based on our research, the main customer of a modern style tearoom were fairly young to middle-aged Chinese generations between the ages of 25-40 and foreign visitors, who were attracted by Thames Town.

This target market expressed a strong interest for tea consuming in a modern Chinese style tearoom. Due to the fact that the younger generation of Chinese grew up with a tea consuming culture, but not branded with the most traditional style, western visitors are suffering from lack of information to learn more about the tastes of Chinese tea.

In other words, they desired a modern tearoom that can offer them a place steeped in culture with great tasting of tea products and meets social networking requirements.

Design Solution

Based on our understanding of the audience and their main sales triggers, we created a design system that refined tea culture in the modernist presentation through visual language and brand commitment.

ZenTea’s logo, Colour palette, Typographic style and Image palette. In the purpose to bring a fresh direct image of ZenTea, we created a logo with a tea leaf in the middle of a circular shaped tea cup, inspired from the view above a tea cup while waiting for tea to steep; the shape and colour of the tea leaves’ floating in water and tastefully placed traditional Chinese calligraphy.

The final logo was made to be clean, simple and minimalist, which can deliver the information directly.

We will extend the visual language for ZenTea into more details of branding.

The poster had drawn a life journey about tea with four images portraying fresh tea leaves, ready to use tea leaves, tea water and steeped tea leaves. This was for in-door and out-door use to bring the imagination of the tea smells and flavor to the customer before they have tried the tea.

The packaging design created a collection of paper strip seals to reflect different types of tea and carefully selected paper bags for customers to get a scent of the natural aroma from tea leaves, outside of the paper bag.

For in-store merchandising, we strongly recommended our client maintain the same layout as the tea room before, due to the fact that the similarity can maintain loyalty with previous customers and keep an existing flow of consumers. Staff uniform had selected oriental cuttings from denim materials to express ZenTea’s modern, relaxing atmosphere with a jest of oriental charm.