Miller Creative was responsible for: brand naming, brand identity, packaging for dog treats, (another fabulous people-confection coming soon!) and website/landing page.

The dog treats bag was letterpress printed – mainly because of the (small) size of the run and the stock bags we wanted to use. We couldn’t get a screen printer to take on the job, so we decided to pursue letterpress printing. Jon Selikoff of Vote for Letterpress was willing to take on this challenging job, which ended up printing beautifully. The bags were printed both front and back, with virtually no show-through thanks to his impeccable attention to detail.

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!

Inspired by the Canadian milk pouch – a clear lightweight pouch placed in a reusable carafe – Julie decided to create a bottle that used a lot less plastic to provide a lot more sustainability.

Her eureka moment came in 2007 when she opened the box for her new iphone, and it was nestled on a smooth, yet sturdy molded fiber tray. Having found her ideal material, Julie imagined a bottle her children would love to use and could easily hold and pour. She designed a bottle that combines a sturdy outer molded fiber shell made from cardboard boxes and old newspapers with a thin inner plastic pouch and re-sealable cap.

With a bottle prototype in-hand, she showed her children how to pop open the shell, pull out the pouch, and place the separate pieces into the recycling bin. She knew she was on to something when they immediately wanted to do it again! She patented her technology and in May 2008, Ecologic Brands was born.

Today, Julie and the Ecologic team are committed to giving consumers and brands better choices and replacing shelf after shelf of rigid plastic headed for landfill with a new kind of bottle that has better things to do.

The first customer testing the new Ecologic bottle is Straus Family Creamery.

via:ecologic

Once again Heineken has reset the bar on packaging. The Black Light re-invented.