Tea total

Colombia – A new advert for bottled tea brand Hatsu reinforces the company’s anti-heritage ethos.

• The commercial was the brainchild of Buenos Aires-based art director Pablo Alfieri
• In the ad Hatsu promotes a very different design aesthetic from that of its competitors, which tend to rely on tea’s tradition for inspiration

Tea-drinking and its related rituals stretch back millennia, a heritage that the branding around associated products often relies on. This is true even of new developments in the market, such as the recent rise of cold, ready-to-drink tea brands such as Twig Teas.

This is not so for Colombian bottled tea company Hatsu, however, whose packaging has always been vibrantly modern, centring on bold block colours and a vertical sans serif wordmark. The brand has even produced an adidas special-edition bottle.

This ethos was reiterated in a new advert for the company, which follows the recent trend for 1980s-inspired Neo-Kitsch graphic design, defined by jarring patterns and neon-pastel colour palettes. In the ad Hatsu bottles tumble across a geometric landscape of fabrics and furniture that is as outré as the brand’s packaging. This uncanny playground, in which even the plants are expressively decorated, communicates the brand’s core concepts of wellness and exoticism without relying on the tired tropes of tea’s tradition.