The Focus
Developing a packaging structure for Paper Boat’s line of ethnic beverages
Ensuring that the packaging structure helps differentiate the product in a highly cluttered beverages market
Understanding and applying the way in which ethnic beverages are consumed in order to maximise sensory and tactile experiences
The Design
Our team at Elephant chose a highly indigenous structure: the doy pack and augmented it considerably to contain the beverage which greatly reduces transportation costs
The pouches are made of a four-part laminate that mixes polyethylene and PET, ensuring maximum freshness in addition to resisting extreme pressure and heat
The pouches are also gusseted to help them stand on shelves with a special, boat-shaped cap that makes it ideal for a variety of situations – from a classic ‘on-the-go’ kind of purchase to carrying it around without any danger of spill-overs
The Story
The virtue of Indian diversity extends even to its seasons. You can typically experience everything from freezing winters, torrential monsoons and scorching summers in the span of a single year. The same goes for most of our cultural festivals that often rely on seasonal changes. The calendar, hence, is peppered with special occasions and for every occasion – there is a drink.
This is where Paper Boat comes in. Since big brands have pretty much dominated the beverage market with non-indigenous products, many used to get their dose of ‘ethnic’ beverages only within the comforts of their home town. That nostalgia, those recipes and that taste could not easily be recreated elsewhere, and it surely couldn’t be purchased at your local store – that is, until Paper Boat entered the fray.
So, when they came to Elephant with this idea and entrusted us with its branding and packaging from scratch, we knew that we had a very unique and innovative journey ahead of us.
The Paper Boat story is based on the quintessentially Indian childhood hobby of making paper boats. Another key inspiration was an iconic piece of Indian music: the song Woh Kagaz Ki Kashti Wo Barish Ka Pani.
This made it clear that this wasn’t just another product, or flavour for you to buy and consume. It was an experience: The experience of childhood nostalgia.
Naturally, the packaging structure needed to accompany this radically fresh brand story.
The Materials
We also had to keep several things in mind when choosing the ideal materials for the pack. The beverage needed to be contained without any artificial preservatives to keep it fresh, it needed to survive temperature and pressure changes, it needed to minimise costs when it came to procurement and transport and it needed to keep moisture out.
Finally, the material needed to be flexible and highly malleable to allow for unique structuring and streamlining the ergonomics of ‘holding’ and ‘utilising’ the pack for a variety of uses.
Considering this, we decided to opt for a four-layer amalgam of sorts where different layers provided different functions. The innermost layer is made up of virgin, food-grade polyethylene which keeps the drink fresh and delicious. The penultimate layer, meanwhile, is made up of bonded aluminium to protect the drink from moisture and sunlight.
Thus, not only is the package extremely durable, it is also light and easily portable as compared to conventional plastics (PET) or for that matter, glass.
Lastly, this material is extremely print friendly, allowing us to utilise our packaging in a diverse and useful manner.
“The beverage needed to be contained without any artificial preservatives to keep it fresh, it needed to survive temperature and pressure changes, it needed to minimise costs when it came to procurement and transport and it needed to keep moisture out. All these criteria went into the selection of the perfect material. ”
Repurposing Space Technology
The spirit of futurism and exploration was not confined to the materials alone. After many rigorous design iterations, Elephant chose the Doy pack: sealed plastic bags that can stand, originally designed for pack liquids for astronauts.
The tactile and sensorial experience provided by the doy pack has managed to augment how the consumer drinks Paper Boat. The nostalgic (and yes, traditional) way of consuming fruits has always been messy. There’s a lot of twisting, squeezing and relishing involved. It’s not a clean affair, at any rate.
We decided to play on these tactile and sensorial cues to design this pack, where the user could get that feeling of squeezing fruity goodness (like in aam panna) like they would when they were a kid, minus the mess. We also considered things like the standard volume of a beverage that could sate customers in one single serving to arrive at the 200-250 ml mark.
The bottle-cap is a twist-type, fashioned after a boat (highlighting the brand) and is extremely easy to open. The shape of the package is such that it has become synonymous with the brand itself, rendering it iconic
The pouch has also been gusseted to make it stand on shelves, making it as viable as a PET bottle – while innovative branding, graphics and tiny details on the pack make it stand out even more to customers.
“The tactile and sensorial experience provided by the doy pack has managed to augment how the consumer drinks Paper Boat – the feeling of squeezing fruity goodness (like in aam panna) like you would when you were a kid, minus the mess – is unparalleled.”