The Steep Club

It turns out tea isn’t brewed, as I’d always thought. It’s steeped. Brewing keeps the water on the heat. Steeping takes it off and lets the leaves soak until their flavour comes out.

So the brand draws out what’s inside too. You know what’s in the box before you’ve read a word, and whether you’re reaching for morning or night.

Before any of that, I played. The name stacked three ways, the letters of TEA turned into a pattern, and that pattern tried in three colourways to see which held up.

For a while the ranges were Midnight and Energise, in plum and orange. Most of it never made the packs. The heavy capitals did.

The two ranges do opposite jobs. They had to be different enough to tell apart, and close enough to read as one club. So I gave both the same pack: a grid with a gradient running down it. Together they stand for time passing, which is the one thing that separates a morning tea from a night-time one.

The colour is the difference. Rise’s gradient runs to acid yellow, a nod to the morning sun, and Unwind’s to purple, for the night drawing in. Everything else stays the same, down to the black tab the tea’s name sits in.

The type is Thunder, a heavy condensed sans set in capitals, big enough to fill the side of a box. On the shipping boxes, “Join the Partea” repeats until it runs off every edge. On the packs the type turns on its side.

I wrote the rest of the copy as the same kind of joke: “Smells like tea spirit” on one poster, “Let the loose-leaf tea loose” on another, and “Brew can do it” along the packing tape.

The monthly box belongs to neither range: plain kraft card, “Your monthly tea subscription” in black, and the “Brew can do it” tape across the top in green, the one colour that isn’t Rise’s or Unwind’s.

As far as I know, The Steep Club never launched, so the packs only ever lived in mockups like these.