The range of organic Fairtrade drinks is by a company called All Good. The creative agency designing the branding and packaging is called The Special Group. Think this might be story about achieving standout? It is. All Good and The Special Group have created not one, but four distinctive brands.
All Good began as a New Zealand company importing organic Fairtrade bananas. Two years ago, the small business trying to make a difference had a big idea: “If you’re going to drink something that has sugar in it (bad), it should at least be organic and Fairtrade (good).”
How karma became a cola
So it developed a cola whose ingredients come from developing nations, with a share of profits from the sale of each bottle going back to the local communities. The All Good founders felt that was good karma – so Karma Cola became the new drink’s name.
Its recipe combines real cola nut from the Boma village in Sierra Leone with natural spices; cinnamon, nutmeg and coriander with lemon, lime and orange oils, vanilla bean grown by the Forest Garden Growers Association in Sri Lanka and organically grown and processed sugar cane from the Suminter Organic Farmers Consortium in Maharashtra India. It uses organic malt extract for flavour and colour instead of artificial colouring, preservatives or phosphoric acid.
Not only does All Good pay a fair price for the raw produce, part of the proceeds from the sale of every bottle goes back to the people of Boma and Naiahun to invest in community projects. Funds from sales of Karma Cola help to rebuild crops and communities in the aftermath of war, to build a fresh water well and processing centre for crops, and help to buy tools to rehabilitate the cola plantations. Karma Cola funds have helped to build a bridge to connect two parts of the village that couldn't be crossed easily and are sending fifteen young girls to school.
This is where The Special Group came in. The agency commissioned New Zealand artist, Beck Wheeler, to create the identity and packaging that created cut through for the new brand and underlined All Good’s “heart”. The work won the Purple Pin, two Golds and a Silver in Designers Institute of New Zealand Best awards in 2013 and a Distinguished Merit in the 3 x 3 International Illustration Awards. It combines the characters of good / bad with a hand crafted illustration. The wordmark loops back on itself in a tongue-in-cheek reference to the truth of “what comes around goes around”.
When life gives you Lemmy, whistle.
The second and third All Good products were Lemmy, a lemonade made with organic Fairtrade lemons and organic cane sugar and Gingerella, made with Fairtrade organic ginger, lemon, Fairtrade organic vanilla from Sri Lanka and sugar from India.
Special Group personified Lemmy and gave him a special story. This is how it goes: “Lemmy has a child-like innocence and sense of belief about him, where telling the truth and doing what feels right is just his natural response. His idealistic sense of optimism leads him to see the good in people, situations and the world. Why would it be any different? He just feels lucky to be a part of it all.
The agency commissioned US illustrator, Matt Campbell, to bring to life happy-go-lucky Lemmy. “As a lemon, it may not seem luck is always on his side, but whistling away he thinks is the luckiest guy in the world.”
Why Gingerella is setting the world on fire
Gingerella’s ginger comes from from Forest Garden Growers, a cooperative made up of 130 small family farmers who grow a variety tropical spices and fruit. The All Good ginger is grown in the central and Uva provinces in Sri Lanka. It is organically grown without pesticides, herbicides or chemical fertilisers using traditional farming techniques.
Faced with low productivity, agrochemical contaminations, degraded lands, low bio diversity and nutrient imbalances as the result of conventional agriculture, its famers switched to organic and biodynamic farming to replenish their land and their livelihood. They have had to stand up to the might of middlemen and multinational agro-chemical companies in order to get a fair price for their crops, improve the health and productivity of their farms, and the quality and quantity of their harvests.
Special Group describes the brands as “Mother Earth meets Barbarella meets activist.” It chose New Zealand illustrator James Stewart for his typographic prowess, to bring to life the strong, defiant, fiery redhead character, Gingerella, “who dares us to taste the justice".
All Good gets a sparkling personality
In June this year, All Good launched a range of organic sparkling fruit drinks. The company had spent two years looking for the juiciest, most intensely flavoured organic fruit to use in the drinks that combine the whole fruit – including the oils from the skin and the pith of the citrus fruits – with only organic cane sugar and sparkling water to create the most rich and intense taste possible.
This time, All Good chose Sydney typographer, Luke Lucas, to create the ‘Sound of Music’ inspired type for the curvy bottle chosen for the new range. This is the story behind behind Lucas’ work:
“It’s very rare for a client to have a passion for design and typography let alone be familiar with the design legacy of the late Herb Lubalin (NY based art director, graphic designer and typographer) so it was a very pleasant surprise when All Good Organics’ Simon Coley met me in a café in Melbourne last June and proceeded to talk typography. From the outset, I recognised that this would be a great project to be involved with. Simon relayed that he wanted the type for their organic sparkling waters to be truly custom, juicy, and to take inspiration from Lubalin’s use of ligatures (connected letter combinations) and swashy typographic forms.
It was decided very early on that the labelling would be as minimal as possible to allow the lettering to sing. Where most clients would say “can you make the logo bigger?” and treat the flavour information as more of a visual garnish for the logo, this brief was the very reverse. In terms of the logo on the bottle, the choice was made to exclusively use the All Good Organics bird and integrate it individually within each typographic layout so that the bird appears to be interacting with the type. The aim was to integrate the brand into the flavour lettering in the subtlest of ways to allow a single design piece to sit front and centre on the bottle with no further distractions or unnecessary visual clutter.
From a technical viewpoint the beautiful custom teardrop shaped bottle came with some design challenges that required a little left and right brain teamwork to process. Due to the label application process, the area that would accommodate the type was a tapered rectangle. This combined with the reality that the flavour names were of varying lengths and line breaks, yet needed to hold the same presence and weight on the bottle made this a particularly tricky design response. It’s the type of challenge that type nerds like myself welcome.
The end result sees the flavour description lettering style, colour of the water and the bottle shape working in partnership to become an extension of the All Good Organics brand.”
The world’s Fairest Trader
On June, 12 Fairtrade International, that oversees 27,000 products carrying the Fairtrade mark in 120 countries, awarded All Good the international Fairtrade Trader award.
