Herbs & Kettles

Sector

F&B

What we did

Brand strategy, narrative, packaging content

Year

2025

In short

A gargantuan project to rebrand Herbs & Kettles, an Atlanta tea brand bringing India’s most premium teas to the world. We partnered with 9133 Design Studio to give this much-loved tea brand an overhaul. 9133 led the visual identity and design. Rough Paper led the brand story, tonality, and content. Together we created such lovely work, if I do say so myself.

The context

Herbs & Kettles had a wonderful premise and product — an artisanal tea brand offering single-origin, single-batch teas directly from small sustainable farms across India to American consumers. They wanted to transform into a more premium and narrative-driven brand to...

- Match the quality of their products
- Call out to their Indian roots
- Make their brand stand out in the market and on the shelf
- Appeal to a US audience without resorting to Indian cliches and stereotypes

Spotlight on the chaiwalas

And so we gave new life to H&K's chaiwalas - mascots in the form of the most popular, wild yet endangered animals of India. A unique way to draw the American audience into the Indian ecosystem and showcase its authenticity and connection to the founders' homeland.

These mascots — rhinos, red pandas, clouded leopards, sangais, tahrs, lions and more — represented various regions in India where the tea was sourced from. Through communication and design, they were positioned as the brand's voice for specific tea variants and lines, talking to the audience to showcase the landscape and culture of India, raising awareness of the wildlife there and the challenges they face. The Herbs & Kettles brand then used their CSR efforts to support relief causes for their very chaiwalas through animal welfare funds.

A whole forest's worth of mascots

9133 redesigned the entire brand to spotlight the animal mascots, each of which represented one line of teas.

We defined a tonality full of delight, wonder, and a genuine love for our land which contains these teas and the animals that represent it. With two distinct brand voices — of Herbs & Kettles the brand and of our mascots as a whole— we defined the communication for the product packaging, website, and other brand collateral.

Herbs & Kettles had a whopping range of 44 teas, each of which got their own unique label and description content written out with a focus on the chaiwala mascot representing them.

Here are a few samples.