Gaia Agua Product Design
During the spring of 2021, we were tasked with a product design project. The full brief was to redesign an existing product that is currently available in the market today. We were tasked to be the sole product designer for our own project, and the redesigns were completely up to us; although it should in theory improve the overall product. So, I then later on decided to redesign the “Boxed Water” water cartons. These milk cartons filled with water have a distinct look of having just the name on one side with a plain white background. This type of branding similarly mimics Virgil Abloh’s Off White style in the hype beast community. This community consists of sneaker collectors, streetwear fashion brands, companies, and artists all over the industry. The hype beast community also markets and sells products differently, selling online products with a waiting room, and intentionally manufacturing less products to create demand and hype.
The problem with Boxed Water is that it is not marketed towards the same target audience. Boxed water is currently being sold exclusively at higher end grocery stores such as PCC, Trader Joes, etc. The audience in this market do not see boxed water as aesthetic or unique but rather strange. I had the opportunity to interview a fellow peer and she stated that “I feel like I have to be a certain type of person to drink that in public”. She further on goes to state that the product looks too expensive for her as well. This is not good for the Boxed Water is actually very cheap. I believe that it was only 2 dollars which is about the same price as other water bottles. I then took initiative to completely redesign the Boxed Water.
For my redesign’s narrative, I wanted to keep the earhtfriendly concept that Boxed Water lives by and that is the promise to plant a tree for every unit sold. I then chose the theme “save the turtles” as it has the same goals of boxed water and that is contribute to our ecosystem. I believe that this would make much more sense and resonate with the target audience, since there are thousands of marine lives dying due to plastics in our ocean. I updated the color pallet to a cool them, then logo into a hand-written script to add character, and the products geometric design to mimic a turtle on its top surface. I Updated the name as well to Gaia Agua, which meant earth water in Spanish.
Everything was coming together although I hit a serious problem, and that is my old MacBook not being able to handle Adobe Dimension. The rendering time was horrible, and everything was just lagging. I ultimately decided to go the old school route and print it at a print shop and manually assemble. It took be an extra day to layout the actual print dimensions in illustrator and print the said product. I then assembled it and retouched the paint with some left over gauche that I had. I took some mock photos, and later on edited them in Lightroom Classic. The mockups of the product overall looked great, my professor was impressed, and overall I would consider this project a success!
