Designed by Subplot.

Founded in 1997, Level Ground Trading’s mission is to trade fairly and directly with small-scale producers in developing countries, and to market their products in North America, offering their customers ethical choices. The company steadily grew a local, loyal following for their range of coffees, as well as recent introductions of raw cane sugar and dried fruit. However, as the company and brand grew, Level Ground began to compete with more sophisticated brands farther afield, and were failing to connect in a meaningful way with a broader consumer audience.
The new logomark declares boldly the superiority of “Direct Fair Trade”: two hands (and dialogue bubbles) shake, forming an “equal” sign between them. This brand identity is founded on equality, fairness and relationships, and brings a human touch right into the logomark itself.
The packaging platform takes the thought further: the producer is the real hero. The producers grace authentic kraft bags, with a label that declares Level Ground’s expertise and deep knowledge of the origins and taste profiles of each of their coffees. The Identity Platform completes the circle: engaging copy like “We shake the hands that pick the coffee”, “Coffee lover. Meet coffee grower”, and “Good. From crop to cup” expresses the duality of “direct fair trade” and “superior coffee”.

Never to be put off by a little dirty work, Ecocreative has designed and produced packaging and point-of-sale recycling stations for the launch of Jeffries compost, soil and mulch bagged products. Five garden and horticulture products that were once only available by the truck or trailer load will now be sold from commercial stockists in handy gardening sizes for the first time. Several of the products are certified to NASAA organic standards.

These bags will come in for some rough treatment and be exposed to the sun, rain, so the packaging design needed to be robust and couldn’t be shy! Bold earthy colours and textures have been assigned to the different product categories for easy identification, no matter how you find the bag. These identifiers set the basis for an ‘easy as 1, 2, 3’ infographic that features on the reverse of each bag and throughout supporting collateral, showing everyone how to get the best out of their gardening experience.

‘Making our products available in bags has long been a goal for us and represented a huge challenge’, notes Jeffries Managing Director, Lachlan Jeffries. ‘We needed to meet our own demanding standards for quality, integrity and sustainability and address many technical challenges and other requirements regarding certifications, labelling and standards. We’ve worked closely on our brand with Ecocreative over the past few years and they really get what we’re about. All the hard work is worth it everything about the bags exceed my expectations. They look just awesome and I am excited about what this will do for our business.’

There is also an educational aspect to the bags. It was necessary to broaden awareness of Jeffries role as an innovative recycler. Ecocreative created the Jeffries ‘green organics loop’ to show that the garden prunings, lawn clippings and other raw materials collected from the green organic wheelie bins of South Australian homes, are transformed by Jeffries into compost, soil and mulch products, ready to go back into South Australian gardens. It’s important for people to remember that whatever is put in their green organics bins could end up in our own back yards, so we needed to reinforce that the green bin is no place for plastic or anything else that won’t make good compost, soil or mulch.

Once the compost, soil or mulch is on the garden or in pots, people are left not with empty bags (destined for landfill), but with an opportunity to keep helping Jeffries keep recycling. As the SA-made plastic bags are not yet recyclable through traditional government waste streams, they cannot be put in yellow-lid kerbside bins. To tackle this issue head on, Jeffries has organised its own bag return program. Customers can return their bags to their stockist in specially marked brown recycling bins (branded with some help from Ecocreative). Jeffries takes care of the rest, organising the recycling of the bags into other plastic products. What’s more, for every bag returned to the retailer Jeffries donates 50 cents to Community Garden Projects in South Australia!

‘This ambitious move into the sale of premium garden product in bags is much more than a category-breaking move into a competitive marketplace’, says Matthew Wright-Simon, Ecocreative’s Director, ‘it’s about packaging the Jeffries culture of innovation in recycling, environmental responsibility and community engagement all at once and wrapping it up in a retail experience right at the point where a person is committing to doing something positive—getting something good for the garden and getting their hands dirty! As a partner in Jeffries’s positive growth story, Ecocreative is proud to have been part of such a great initiative. After all, it embraces two of our favourite things, recycling and gardening!