The Cool Gardener Packaging

Agency: Curious Design Design: Monique Robins Illustration: Daron Parton Project Type: Produced Client: The Cool Gardener Location: Auckland, New Zealand Packaging Contents: Plant-based meals Packaging Substrate / Materials: Paper Printing Process: Offset

At The Cool Gardener they want to make it easy for everyone to enjoy nutritious, delicious plant-based meals—whether you’re vegan, vegetarian or flexitarian, dairy or gluten free.From garden to table, they do all the hard work for you, picking the best New Zealand produce and combining it with natural ingredients for fast, flavourful food the whole family can enjoy.

From Kauri Coast kumara to Hawke’s Bay beets, their veges are grown with care and harvested by hand. They’re then combined with delicious hearty flavours, hand packed and snap frozen, ready to go whenever you need them.

Curious was commissioned to create a complete brand and communications strategy for our client that specifically reached out to the rapidly emerging flexitarian and millennial food trend savvy consumers. The process started with us fashioning a name that encapsulated the mood and essence of the brand. Many options were explored and short listed, but The Cool Gardener was the perfect solution. It has a contemporary vibe, it represents the ‘grown with care and harvested by hand’ USP and the ‘Cool’ word is a subtle nod to the product being snap frozen.

Once the name was established, we then began to build a marque that visually personified it. The character was the key component, as we wanted it to have an authentic New Zealand gardener feel to represent the provenance of the ingredients and a connection to the land. Daron Parton from Watermark was selected as the illustrator and through his beautiful, evocative linework he has created a personality that is both engaging and genuine. A hand crafted piece of typography by Jo Tronc was then introduced to seamlessly integrate with the imagery.