perez-fox.com » Honest Tea Not So Honest

Honest Tea Not So Honest

2009.09.29 18:18

Honest Tea

Honest Tea, a fancy-pants organic drinks brand, and Coca-Cola property, has reengineered their bottles to appear larger, but are actually the same size. Treachery.

This sort of on-shelf scammery gets a massive thumbs-down from me. Straightforwardness should be part of every brand’s offering, but especially for a brand that has the word “Honest” in its name! This would be like discovering that Innocent smoothies was actually running a child prostitution ring.

The story lives here »

2 Comments »
a tale of brands & branding, design_packaging

http://www.honesttea.com Kelly @ Honest Tea

Many thanks for writing and for your honest feedback. We recently switched to a thinner bottle, one which is 22% lighter. This saves us money and saves the world resources. The only problem is that the thinner bottle had the risk of getting dented. In fact, this was a real problem that forced us to redesign the bottle. To help keep its shape, the inside must be under pressure. When the bottle is filled with hot tea, the liquid expands and the plug on the bottom pops out. (If you squeeze real hard, you can make this happen.) Then as the tea cools, the plug pops back in and creates the pressure on the inside that prevents the bottles from being damaged. The thinner plastic means we needed more pressure and hence the bigger plug. There really is 16.9 oz. inside and we aren’t trying to pull a fast one. But I can see how one could think that we are trying to be deceptive and so we’ve updated our website and in the next label run we have some new text to explain the plug to our customers. I hope that makes you feel that you can still trust us.
http://www.honesttea.com Kelly @ Honest Tea

Many thanks for writing and for your honest feedback. We recently switched to a thinner bottle, one which is 22% lighter. This saves us money and saves the world resources. The only problem is that the thinner bottle had the risk of getting dented. In fact, this was a real problem that forced us to redesign the bottle. To help keep its shape, the inside must be under pressure. When the bottle is filled with hot tea, the liquid expands and the plug on the bottom pops out. (If you squeeze real hard, you can make this happen.) Then as the tea cools, the plug pops back in and creates the pressure on the inside that prevents the bottles from being damaged. The thinner plastic means we needed more pressure and hence the bigger plug. There really is 16.9 oz. inside and we aren’t trying to pull a fast one. But I can see how one could think that we are trying to be deceptive and so we’ve updated our website and in the next label run we have some new text to explain the plug to our customers. I hope that makes you feel that you can still trust us.

Prescott's Design Blog

Honest Tea Not So Honest

Search

Recent Entries

Subscribe

Categories

Tip Jar