Packaging is Worth a Thousand Words

Tonx ships freshly roasted coffee beans to your door. I recently signed up for a sample, and before I even brewed the first cup, I knew it was going to be good quality. How? The packaging.

First of all, the coffee itself was in a sexy-looking silver airtight package that you could imagine being on the International Space Station.

It also came with three small but perfectly-formed pieces of card.

1) Greetings Fellow Coffee Achiever! The implied message – “You’re a smart person. And you’re part of a club“. It goes on to tell you how excited they are about the beans they have just shipped you.

2) The Beans. An evocative description of the origins of the beans (with a photo on the other side).

“The San Ignacio Cooperative is made up hundreds of producers near Puntina Punco in the Sandia Valley of Peru. With exceptional soil and great shade, mostly Caturra and Typica coffee varieties make up the crop. With farms averaging 2.5 hectares, most of the farmers pick their own coffee before hand-crank pulping and fermenting in concrete tanks. Some even have channels for density sorting after washing the coffee. While the cooperative offers centralized drying for the smallholder producers, the majority dry their own on covered beds. San Ignacio is a complex, balanced cup, and performs great across many brew methods. A fragrance of clove and cinnamon paves the way for a creamy cup with flavors of milk chocolate, red delicious apple, and toasted walnut.”

3) The Brew.  An eye-catching graphic with seven ways to create that cup of coffee – and on the back some “Brew Basics” for those who are looking for guidance.

So here’s the thing. Before I even brewed the first cup, I was hooked. I knew it was a quality product, created by people who care, with a story behind it. And I knew I wanted to sign up for their bi-weekly subscription plan.

Of course, the coffee was delicious, once I finally stopped taking photos of the packaging long enough to grind the beans and put it in the french press.

So, if you love good coffee, if you love good product design or you love good marketing, Tonx is a must-try (and for me,that’s a trifecta!).