Bronze Packaging Design · 2026
Songfengruo Ancient Tree Black Tea Packaging
- A' Design Award 2026 Bronze Winner in Packaging Design
- Awarded April 15, 2026
- CLIENT: Songfengruo
- Estimated Number of Design Views: 5,734
- Verification code 310DB17307 · Verify this award
About Songfengruo Ancient Tree Black Tea Packaging
Songfengruo Ancient Tree is a gift box designed for premium black tea. The outer box measures 240 mm by 60 mm by 240 mm and holds three small drawers, each 65 mm by 40 mm by 150 mm. A pine needle symbol was created for the brand and repeated as a tiled pattern on the drawers. Colorless relief printing adds depth to the flat paper. The neatly arranged drawers recall the Chinese folding screen. Dark brown tones and paper with tea fiber and texture express the brand's pursuit of nature, health, and quality.
Suzhou SoFeng Design Co.,Ltd.'s Songfengruo Ancient Tree Black Tea Packaging exemplifies the sophisticated intersection of traditional material culture and contemporary minimalist design philosophy, positioning itself within a lineage of luxury packaging systems that employ chromatic and formal restraint as primary vehicles for communicating heritage, quality, and cultural authenticity. The work engages deeply with material semiotics, selecting a richly textured brown substrate reminiscent of handmade paper or compressed organic fiber, a choice that immediately establishes associations with natural processes, artisanal production methods, and pre-industrial craft traditions, while the granular surface quality visible through subtle tonal variations suggests both tactile engagement and the honest expression of material character. The compositional achievement demonstrates sophisticated understanding of systematic design thinking, presenting a complete product family ranging from the prominent shopping bag with its elegantly understated textile handles through various nested boxes and flat containers, each component maintaining visual coherence through consistent material treatment and proportional relationships while clearly articulating hierarchical distinctions through scale progression and typographic placement. The chromatic strategy proves particularly accomplished, restricting the palette almost exclusively to the burnt umber to raw umber spectrum, achieving monochromatic unity that evokes the color of aged tea, rich soil, weathered wood, and traditional paper, while subtle warm-cool temperature shifts across different surfaces create necessary visual articulation without disrupting overall tonal harmony, and the strategic deployment of metallic gold calligraphy provides essential accent and cultural anchoring without overwhelming the restrained earthiness. Formal organization follows principles of asymmetric balance, with the vertical shopping bag form positioned slightly off-center creating visual weight that finds equilibrium through the distributed arrangement of smaller boxes extending into the compositional field, while the frontal viewpoint and shallow depth of field establish clarity of visual communication, allowing each element to be understood both as individual component and as participant in the larger systematic vocabulary. The lighting treatment employs soft directional illumination that creates gentle graduated shadows, these atmospheric cast shadows rendered with translucent warmth that reinforces the earth palette while providing essential spatial separation and anchoring each form to the neutral ground plane. The typographic intervention proves judicious and culturally resonant, employing vertical calligraphic characters in metallic gold on several components, suggesting traditional orientation conventions and reinforcing heritage positioning, while one larger box features a white rectangular label containing black characters within a delicate linear border, this crisp geometric element providing necessary compositional counterpoint to the organic warmth surrounding it and establishing a focal point that draws the eye while maintaining overall visual quietude. Thematically, the work appears to explore packaging as cultural communication, engaging questions of how containment systems can embody and transmit values of heritage, craftsmanship, authenticity, and considered quality, suggesting that luxury in contemporary contexts may be effectively signaled through material honesty, chromatic discipline, and refined simplicity rather than decorative elaboration or visual complexity. The design seems to honor traditional tea culture and archival preservation rituals while translating these values into a contemporary visual language that resonates with audiences seeking authenticity, cultural continuity, and meaningful material engagement in an increasingly dematerialized commercial landscape. Viewers might contemplate how this packaging system negotiates the tension between commercial function and cultural expression, how material choices and surface treatments can serve as carriers of narrative and value, and how systematic design thinking can create coherent visual languages that enhance rather than diminish the qualities of the products they protect and present, inviting appreciation for packaging design as a discipline capable of elevating everyday commercial transactions into moments of aesthetic consideration and cultural connection.
Press Kit
- Unique Properties
- Songfengruo, a brand originating from the tea-producing region of China, is rooted in exploring premium tea gardens, bringing high-quality tea to tea lovers and extending the beauty of tea art into everyday life.
- Dimensions & Packaging
- Gift box size,length 240mm x width 60mm x Height 240mm, Tea box,length 65mm x width 40mm x Height 150mm.
- Tags
- Branding, Packaging, Tea
- Production Technology
- The overall color scheme of the tea packaging uses dark brown tones, and it is made with artistically expressive paper to showcase the brand's pursuit of "nature, health, and quality".
- Design Challenge
- The brand's founder is deeply rooted in exploring premium tea gardens, bringing high-quality tea to tea lovers, extending the beauty of tea art into everyday life, and conveying premium tea with the intention of gift-giving. Zen-inspired tea ceremonies exude an understated artistic charm.
- Project Duration
- The project started in February 2025 in Suzhou, China and finished in May 2024 in Suzhou, China.
- Operation Flow
- The outer box uses a simple and elegant color scheme, with subtle use of craftsmanship to enhance its sophistication. Within this single-color system, paper with tea fiber and texture is chosen to add detail and a sense of refinement.
- Research
- The overall color scheme uses dark brown tones and employs artistically expressive paper to showcase the brand's pursuit of "nature, health, and quality."
- Inspiration
- We created a pine needle symbol that is representative of the brand and enhanced brand recognition through the use of a single element and a tiled pattern. The pine needle pattern is tiled on the three individual drawers inside, and a colorless relief printing technique enhances the expressiveness of the flat paper. When the large box is opened, the three smaller drawers are neatly arranged, also alluding to the Chinese cultural concept of a screen.
- Image Credits
- Image #1, Image #2, Image #3, Image #4, Image #5: Photographer Jiayi Lu, 2025.
- Patents
- Copyrights belong to Songfengruo, 2025.