HappiFish Premium Fish Food
Student Brief
Demographic: Young Start-ups
This was a brief we were given at Shillington College, to come up with not only the packaging for a new food brand but also a great and in depth back story to support it.
HappiFish was born from the idea that both overfeeding and underfeeding are very bad for goldfish. HappiFish is a new type of fish food produced for fish that live in a shared space such as an office environment or houseshare, even family homes where nobody really knows if anyone has fed the fish or how much to feed them. It comes in pre-measured sachets like sugar sachets with the days of the week printed on them so that you can see at a glance if the fish have been fed today.
The back story goes thus:
Goldfish are descended from the wild carp, which always used to be grey. Every so often a genetic mutation would produce a brilliant red or orange fish, which were quickly spotted by predators and gobbled up!
Buddhist monks in Japan used to rescue these mutated fish and keep them safe in separate ‘mercy ponds’.
Over the years the monks rescued
many many fish, and began to perfect nutritionally beneficial recipes to keep the fish fed and healthy.
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But the fish weren’t healthy!
One monk called Kogi, was concerned that they were overfeeding the fish and literally killing them with kindness.
The feeding of the fish was something that all the monks liked to do and nobody knew how many times a day they had been fed.
(Especially during times of silent meditation when communication was not so great...)
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So Kogi came up with a method of portioning up the fish food with bamboo leaves and laying out stones to denote if and when the fish had been fed.
And the fish thrived!
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Today we use vacuum sealed foil sachets for freshness rather than bamboo leaves; but the system is the same.
We even wrote the days of the week on the sachets so that you’ll never again have to wonder if anyone has fed the fish today.
We like to think Kogi would approve.
And your goldfish will thank you too.
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HappiFish. For Healthy, Happy Fish.
The branding for HappiFish is inspired by the Buddhist monks in Japan who used to rescue these brightly coloured fish. I used traditional Japanese inspired patterns, the Japanese spelling of 'happy' and although originally the packaging was a deep turquoise and red, I decided to use the bright orange of the colour of the monks robes and the bright orange of the goldfish to define the colour palette of the packaging.