When was the last time packaging made you smile or laugh out loud? If you can’t remember then chances are you’ve never visited “Bnavan,” a fictional town dreamt up as part of an all-purpose brand identity for farm-fresh, healthy food in Armenia. From eggs to olive oil, Bnavan’s packaging unleashes cartoonish, 2-color farmyard animals engaging in clever, whimsical adventures, ensuring that you’ll never mistake a Bnavan product for the competition.
Some of us might still remember the good old days when the milkman dropped off fresh milk at your doorstep. Armenia’s Bnavan has taken this business model a few steps further with their direct-to-consumers (D2C) subscription model.
Designed by Backbone Branding, the genius of this packaging is two-fold.
First, most of the SKUs are digitally printed in Black (with warm yellow accents) as needed directly onto the same White corrugated cardboard, keeping costs down and meaning the board can be sourced in bulk. (That corrugation, incidentally, gives the packaging a subtle tactile quality and an almost felt-like look and feel.)
Perhaps more importantly, the playful personality of the artwork makes Bnavan’s brand identity extremely appealing. Not only does it communicate the freshness of the products by depicting the animals involved in their day-to-day life on the farm, but the creatures themselves are rendered adorably.
In these illustrations, chickens take hot-air balloon rides (with the “balloon” being an egg), make surprise appearances to stare at a cow on the “cow cheese” packaging, and march off the back end of a bovine on a milk label.
Other animals also get into the act, including surprised-looking sheep (for “sheep cheese” – who knew?), while goats climb over haystacks when you position 2 “goat cheese” packages side by side to complete the illustration.
This last is another smart detail, with the design encouraging the purchase of multiple packages so that the youngest members of the family can create little farm-life scenes by placing them next to each other, such as creating a barn and chicken coop pairing when cheese packaging is lined up.
In addition to giving serious branding attention to products that are usually presented as unassumingly as possible, the Bnavan packaging also protects its contents more reliably – especially the cheeses, which are encased in wedge-shaped corrugated boxes.
Who among us could resist joining in these whimsical adventures, especially as the brand frequently updates the packaging by adding new stories of Bnavan heroes?
Now that is effective packaging!
