Aver is a premium CBD drink in a can, disrupting the soft drinks category and tapping into demand for healthier and more functional drinks options.

I founded Aver with a couple of friends to help bring the benefits of CBD to a wider customer base in the UK. The brand was designed for the 'burnout generation' - Millennials living / working in the city and struggling to cope. Aver looked to utilise the healing power of CBD and other functional ingredients to ease the impact modern life was having on daily mental and physical wellbeing.

The CBD space at the time was flooded with two types of brand. The first - cold and medicinal feeling - sought to serve a minority of acute CBD use cases, ignoring the chronic suffering of large groups of young people. The next, in response to the Californian home of consumer cannabis products was typically hippy / cannabis-centric in messaging and aesthetic. I wanted Aver to take from the science backed nature of the medicinal brands, to help create trust in an ingredient the UK public were relatively unfamiliar with; while also drawing from the California-style brands ability to speak to a younger audience.

We designed Aver to feel functional and authoritative, while maintaining a humanist warmth. This informed the typeface choice in Mabry Pro. It's geometric precision and clean structured forms make Mabry highly legible, while subtle quirks in letter shapes created unexpected character in just the right dose. These qualities lent well to creating engaging messaging at scale, and ensuring high legibility of elements like back-of-pack ingredients lists - a notoriously overlooked area of packaging design, but one important to Aver's fanatic health conscious consumer, who typically spent longer searching for nasty ingredients on the back of the can than pretty pictures on the front.

This balance is further explored in the packaging treatment where strict typographic hierarchy and straight-lined grids mix with loose, organic illustrations of natural ingredients. We wanted the products to look like they work, whilst appealing to the lifestyle of a stylish young consumer who knows what they want.

With two SKUs - BOOST + CALM - Aver offered support for customers morning and night. Whether in need of a low caffeine energy boost on the way to work (think energy without the jitters); or a healthy way to wind down when they get home (think relaxation without the booze). The contrast in function between these core SKUs informed the up and down arrows in the logo and set a foundational idea of balance in brand messaging.

Out of 180 entries worldwide, Aver won the 'Best CBD / Hemp Drink' category at the 2021 Global InnoBev Awards.