Goodme - Year of the Snake

GuMing Year of the Snake Packaging Design Rationale

GuMing is a national tea drink brand founded in 2010 in Zhejiang, China, with its core users aged 20-29. It is currently the second largest freshly made tea beverage brand in China. Our design for GuMing’s Year of the Snake New Year packaging aims not just to be visually appealing, but to be fun and highly shareable. Our core challenge was to transform the snake, an element often perceived as intimidating, into something agile, cute, and amusing. Relying purely on creativity rather than co-branding, we aimed to engage directly with consumers, spark photo sharing, and create a festive interactive celebration.

The packaging is practical, playful, structurally efficient for production and use, and visually clean. A charming “Good Luck Snake” pattern entirely abandons any frightening connotations in favor of a lively, agile serpent design. By utilizing the moiré effect, the design incorporates a dynamic interactive feature: when consumers rotate the cup sleeve, they can see the snake’s body lines appear to “wiggle,” instantly bringing the static packaging to life. This is the key interactive highlight. An instruction—“Rotate Left Here”—explicitly invites participation, enhancing engagement. The snake form is cleverly integrated with the auspicious phrase “Fortune and Prosperity Circulating,” merging graphic and blessing into one memorable visual that delivers New Year’s luck directly into the consumer’s hands. The primary color is a Burgundy red, chosen for its more sophisticated and textured feel compared to standard red, fully amplifying the festive atmosphere with a sense of happiness and celebration.

Our ultimate goal was to use design to reposition the “snake” as a symbol of good fortune and fun, genuinely playing alongside consumers and setting the blessings in motion.