New Year, New Cans
We've redesigned our matcha packaging!
What “Japanese-ness” and “d:matcha-ness” Mean to Us
For some time, we felt that our brand was ready for its next stage of growth, and that it was time to refine our design to reflect that.
Our guiding concept was simple: to express both a sense of Japan and the unique identity of d:matcha.
We spent a long time thinking about how best to translate that idea into visual form.
The Japanese characters used in the design were written by us personally, drawing on our past experience practicing calligraphy.
Within the mountain motif, we layered photographs of our own tea fields as the background.
The colors chosen for each cultivar are based on traditional Japanese color palettes, reinterpreted with a modern sensibility - what we think of as contemporary Japanese colors.
For the stickers used on our bag packaging, we worked with a printing company that traditionally produces sake labels for breweries. Sake packaging has long employed advanced printing techniques, such as gold and silver detailing and embossed lettering, and we wanted to incorporate that same craftsmanship into our matcha packaging.
Environmentally Conscious Pull-Top Cans
For our newly created original cans, we chose a pull-top design with both sustainability and ease of use in mind.
Previously, our matcha cans contained an inner plastic bag. With the new pull-top cans, we were able to eliminate that plastic entirely.
But the minimum production run for pull-top cans is 12,000 units.
For us, this represented a significant investment, meaning there was no room for error in the printing process. We produced multiple test samples and adjusted the colors repeatedly before finalizing the design.
The Long Journey to Creating Our Original Cans
Creating custom cans involves several stages:
- Coordinating and refining the design with the can manufacturer
- Printing the original design onto metal sheets at a metal processing company
- Forming and assembling those sheets into finished matcha cans
In particular, achieving the exact color we envisioned for the mountain design proved challenging. Because of this, we personally visited the factory and stood in on the metal printing process, making final color adjustments on-site.
From start to finish, the process took about six months. After navigating so many steps and refinements, we are truly happy to finally share these matcha cans with you.
We hope that through this new packaging, you can feel our passion for matcha and for d:matcha itself.
