Rationale
The product chosen for this redesign project is Herbal Dry Ingredients. The product is predominately used in Chinese soups as well as Chinese medicines. The redesign is a soup starter kit used to make the base of the broth, which adds flavor and nutrients.
The purpose of redesigning a package for this product is because it originally comes packaged in clear plastic bags closed with twist ties or more plastic. It includes nothing but the ingredients and a sticker label of the brand or logo. This makes it hard to understand what the product is used for unless the customer has prior knowledge of the included ingredients.
The final product presented is made of wood, allowing it to be a reusable box. It contains slots for interchangeable dividers for flexible storage space for small items, for example, sewing equipment, hooks and tackle, jewelry, coins and pins, and many other small objects. The lid of the box has a layer of cork to keep the top in place; the cork has a rectangle cut out of it, leaving a slot for a recipe book. The recipe book is held in place with a rubber band to make sure the book does not get lost or misplaced. When reused, the slot can hold personal notes like restriction of sizes for fishing or certificates of authenticity for jewelry.
The default placement for the dividers gives an estimate of proportions if the customer chooses to use the box to refill the ingredients. All the ingredients are wrapped with Japanese Oboner Paper, for the kind of texture that would keep the moisture away from the ingredients. The type is on the shiny side of the paper shows the difference between the textures as the shiny side would have enough strength to repel minion moisture and the inner texture would absorb any trapped moisture. Both the exterior wrap and the interior wrap are made of paper, making them easily recyclable.
Branding
The brand is Lily, named after one of the ingredients found inside the soup starter kit, dried lily bulb. A lily bulb is found at some depth below the surface and often unknown to many. This similarly matches the cooking skills of a student or novice at Chinese Soup making. In a Chinese household, mothers and grandmothers make healthy Chinese soups on a daily basis, but the kids know almost nothing about making these soups.
As the kids leave home, living at school, they have no knowledge of making these familiar soups as well as the benefits they carry. There are many different kinds of lilies as there are different kinds of Chinese soups. Lilies represent wealth and purity as the soup starter kit has contents that help purify one’ s body. A specific lily called the Daylily is symbolic in Chinese culture. Since many mothers in China wear the flower, the Chinese also venerate the day lily as a symbol of filial devotion to one’ s mother ( http:// www. livingartsoriginals. com/ flower- daylily. htm).
This kit promotes health and wellness as it teaches students how to make a simple soup as their mothers would make for them in order to help keep their strength up. The recipe book contains 3 recipes that can be altered easily for the number of servings. The etching on the side of the box is the same as the illustrations on the recipe book. This illustration is of a growing lily, to represent the process of healthy growing. The outer wrap is used as an introduction to the box and it’ s contents, using only red and white as the main colours of this package to resemble first aid kit. Since the ingredients are used in Chinese medicine, using red and white for the medical reference seems sound.
