Our Redesign of the Month series spotlights a deserving brand that is harnessing the power of design to make an impact, tell a story, and outshine its previous packaging.
Hundreds of current category consumers evaluate the old and new designs across a wide range of performance areas, including purchase preference, communication, mental availability, and design-element resonance. Notably, Designalytics’ testing outcomes align with actual sales performance more than 90% of the time, which bodes well for this month’s winner: Califia Farms.
Founded in 2010, Califia Farms began in the fruit juice category before pivoting to focus more on plant-based milks—a fortuitous shift, considering that category has exploded in popularity, with $2 billion in sales last year alone.
Given that the plant-based milk category has been expanding rapidly—the category grew 4% in 2021 and has ballooned 33% over the past three years—the market has seen intensifying competition challenging the clear leaders, Almond Breeze and Silk. Califia Farms likely realized that carving out more market share in this competitive environment required a fresh look for its packaging.
In Designalytics’ most recent category report on non-dairy milk (available to subscribers), Califia Farms received mixed results. The brand’s number of distinctive assets (1.4) was in the top third of the category and its average asset resonance was about average, but its logo resonance was lacking. Moreover, only 61% of consumers could accurately recognize the package from a distance (a measure of mental availability), making Califia Farms’ performance the worst in the category. A few strategic changes, it seemed, could help shore up its design performance.
To understand the scope of the changes, it helps to have some context on the brand’s name. Its namesake is Queen Califia, the ruler of a fictional island from a 16th-century romance story (who also is the inspiration for the name California, where the company is located). Since its imaginary namesake’s face had been part of the brand’s logo for years, that might have kept some brands from removing it. But Califia Farms had other ideas.
First, though, let’s tackle the subtler changes Califia Farms made to its design to maximize its effectiveness, before taking on the topic of its updated logo.
The brand made some conscious decisions about its design’s communication strategy, which is smart considering communication has an 88% correlation to in-market outcomes. To aid in line navigation, the new design doubled-up on communicating varieties—with instances at the top and on a banner in the lower half of the bottle conveying the product variety (in the pictured product, this is “Unsweetened”). To make room, the brand removed the “No sugar added” claim at the top and added “0g sugar” to the bottle of the package.
The brand also decided to simplify by reducing the number of claims on the front of the package. On the Unsweetened variety, for example, “Gluten free” was removed, as was “Carrageenan free” and a reference to having 40% more calcium than dairy milk.
Taste imagery can really improve a design’s performance in the food and beverage space, as we’ve shown. Califia Farms clearly understood this, as it also removed the blossom from its previous design to create a larger, unobscured picture of the almonds at the center of the package. In addition, the brand replaced the lighter-green accent color with a bolder shade of green.
The most consequential change was the deletion of the image of the aforementioned Queen Califia’s face on the neck of the bottle, which was replaced with a much larger, textured, woodcut-like drawing. This change allowed the brand to enlarge its name, which has supplanted Queen Califia’s countenance as the ostensible logo.
In spite of deposing this monarchical brandmark, the new design reigns supreme. Consumers preferred it to its predecessor 65% to 35%.
Keeping the shape of the bottle was a clear win for the brand, as it contributes to mental availability. Califia Farms’ curvy container stands out—and consumers confirmed it was a strong asset for the brand. “The bottle shape is really unique,” said one, while another said the “shape is nice-looking, and I think it would be easy to pour,” and yet another noted “it helps me to immediately see this brand and remember it is what I want.”
The removal of the logo, however, must’ve been a contentious question. After ten years of being the literal face of the brand, Queen Califia was undeniably a part of the brand’s personality. Yet, there were some signs that she may have been doing more harm than good.
For example, while her visage was the most “liked” element of the old design by consumers, it was also the most disliked. Some consumers noted that the image was “odd” and “arrogant” and others seemed confused as to how this logo related to the brand at all. The consumers who did like the logo generally commented on it being “pretty,” with no mention of its mythical pedigree. One even liked it because it was reminiscent of the Starbucks logo.
Plus, removing this logo would free up space on the design, which was used to greatly expand the brand name itself. This helped make the package easier to find (consumers identified the new design in an average of 3.7 seconds versus 5.5 seconds for the old) and easier to recognize from a distance—the new design was spotted from an average of 11.6 feet away rather than only 6 feet away for the old.
Amping up the size of its name may also help with another area which needs improvement: Awareness. Only 59% of consumers were familiar with the brand, among the lowest scores in its category. The larger “Califia Farms” logo could contribute to building name recognition in the minds of Califia-curious consumers, while also allowing loyal consumers to spot their favorite. “The letters are big enough for me to see right away,” said one consumer, while another noted that it helped make it “easy to tell that this is Califia Farms, which means high quality and great taste.”
The new design improved communication across the board, as it topped the old version on each of the 12 most important attributes in the category. It wasn’t just claims, either. The design seemed to better communicate “tastes great” (#3 attribute) through the larger, higher-contrast almond imagery.
Plus, the cheerful, woodcut-style drawing—evoking flora and sunlight—seemed to bolster the product’s taste appeal as well as burnishing the brand’s image as a natural choice. “It's fun and makes me smile when I see it,” one respondent wrote of the design. “It makes me feel like I'm on vacation every time I look at the bottle.”
Wins
Opportunities
“I trust this brand and I like being able to find the brand name easily on the shelf.”
“The brown illustration makes me think of a harvest or something natural and fresh.”
Our goal behind highlighting impactful redesigns is to help brands understand market reactions to design changes and make intentional design decisions. We create a full report of these insightful case studies for every brand redesign in our cross-category database. These value-add tools are created automatically for our clients who subscribe to syndicated category data. For more information on this redesign report or others, contact us.