Anthony's
Naturals

Anthony's Naturals is a family member's brand. I came in with a loose directive. She wanted photorealistic ingredient imagery and something that didn't look like every other wellness brand, but I had a lot of latitude on the rest. My role became both strategist and designer, defining who this brand was, what category it should occupy visually, and how to introduce unfamiliar ingredients to a Western market that doesn't know them yet.

The thesis of the brand is that wellness has been overcomplicated. Most of what's on shelves now is an ingredient list of extracts, natural flavors, and stabilizers dressed up as something pure, but Anthony's Naturals is the opposite of that. Every product is a single ingredient, sourced from Ghana and food traditions around the world, and sold without anything added to hide what it actually tastes like. The brand is named after the founder's late father, a public-health professional who worked with the WHO in West Africa and who raised the family on simple, earth-grown remedies. The brand is his philosophy made into products.

I wanted the name to carry the brand instead of just sitting next to a floating logo, because the name "Anthony's" attaches the brand to a person instead of a company. That felt important for a brand whose entire premise is personal and inherited.

The bee brand mark is the apostrophe because the founder's grandfather was a beekeeper who lived by eating from the earth, and the family philosophy traces back to him. Putting the bee into the punctuation instead of hovering above the type turns the reference into a subtle detail where a traditional logo would have pulled attention away from the name and made the brand feel corporate. The bee can still be pulled out and used as a standalone mark when the brand needs one, but it belongs inside the name first.

The bee's abdomen is a heart which leans into the idea of family, love, community, and hearth.

Most wellness brands default to green, earth tones, and minimalism because it's the obvious answer for a natural brand, but I decided against that from the start. Minimalism works for products the customer already understands, because the design gets to signal premium without doing any explaining. Anthony's Naturals sells baobab, moringa, soursop leaves, and guava leaf tea, all things the Western market has almost no mental model for, so minimalism would have been two barriers stacked on top of each other: unfamiliar product, plus nothing visually warm to reach for.

The packaging had to do the first half of the introduction before a customer read a single word. That's why the bags are high-saturation brand colors, with one per product, with a photorealistic image of the actual ingredient on the front. The color mirrors the brand's friendly warmth, the photograph becomes a moment to educate visually while being transparent about the origins of the product inside, and between the two the product becomes approachable before the customer reads the packaging copy.

On the front of every bag, the health benefits sit to the right of the ingredient image: Debloat support, digestive support, antioxidant rich, or stress relief support, depending on the product. That placement was a response to how wellness gets discovered right now, primarily on TikTok and Instagram, where people are looking for things that address specific concerns like gut health, bloating, and energy. The benefits need to be legible in a two-second scroll, and the packaging had to work as its own marketing asset.

There was a version where we had a flag graphic that said "Sourced from Ghana" on the front, and the founder pushed back on it. I thought it would be a good add because Africa has strong associations with earth and nature, but she was right to push back. Leaning into the Ghana origin on the front risked making the product feel unfamiliar and foreign at the same time, which is one barrier too many for a shelf shopper who already doesn't recognize the ingredient. The Ghana story belongs in the brand, not as the selling point. The origin is still honored throughout the copy and the About page, but it doesn't have to introduce itself first.

The back of every bag has a section titled "Meet ___," always followed by the product name like "Meet Baobab." "Meet Moringa." with a brief description underneath. I wrote it as an introduction because most customers picking up Anthony's Naturals have likely never bought the ingredient before, and the brand has to do the work of introducing it rather than assuming the customer already knows.

Consumers are skeptical of unfamiliar food, especially when the promise is health. The brand voice had to avoid sounding like a supplement company and more like a friend walking you through something new. "Meet Baobab" is a warmer invite to explore the product than "Ingredients: Baobab Fruit Powder."

Below the introduction, every bag includes three to four ways to use the product (a daily smoothie, a morning drink, a baking swap, a simple tea with honey added). That came from the same logic as the introduction section. It's a hard ask to hand someone an unfamiliar ingredient and expect them to figure out what to do with it. The four suggestions remove the last phase of friction between buying the product and actually using it. They let the customer start brainstorming delicious ways to use the product in familiar foods or recipes, which makes the product feel less foreign and boosts their confidence in the purchase before they've opened the bag.

At the bottom of every bag, in small type, there's an easter egg that reads "You pay attention to detail, we like that." It's a nod to the founder's personal philosophy around awareness and noticing the small things, and it rewards the customer who actually turns the bag over and reads the whole thing. A brand that pays attention deserves a customer who pays attention back.

I was in communication with manufacturers overseas and worked directly with their factory dielines. I exported each file out of Illustrator with proper print specs, including bleed, CMYK color profiles, and material constraints. That part of the project is easy to underestimate, but a package that doesn't print correctly is a package that can't ship, so the production work was as much a part of the design as the identity.

Every bag also includes a UPC for retail and a QR code on the back that links directly to the Instagram. The QR code was another friction-reduction decision, because a customer picking up an unfamiliar ingredient is already curious, and giving them a one-scan path to the brand's social proof lets that curiosity convert into trust.

The material was the one spot where the brand's values and the brand's budget had to negotiate. I was an advocate of biodegradable packaging because a brand whose whole premise is respect for nature shouldn't be shipping in plastic. The founder pushed back because she wasn't sure the products would sell yet and didn't want to commit to a premium substrate before the market responded. We landed on BOPP, which is recyclable and matte-finish, and holds print quality well enough that the brand still reads as premium at retail. It wasn't my first choice, but it was the right compromise for where the brand was in its life, and one of the early lessons of the project was that a brand designer's job is partly to advocate for the ideal and partly to know when to meet the business where it is.

For the website, a lot of minimal-ingredient wellness e-commerce goes clinical white and stripped-back because that's what "premium" is supposed to look like online, but a cold sterile site for baobab powder would have put a second barrier in front of the customer after they clicked through. The brand's warmth needed to carry over.

The hero headline reads "Wellness shouldn't be complicated" which is the brand's thesis in four words, and everything else on the site is in service of it. The palette stays in the packaging's color family with warm cream backgrounds instead of stark white, and the product photography also leans domestic with kitchen backdrops and generous breakfast foods instead of clinical seamless imagery. The voice also stays in the same hospitable register throughout. The About page opens with the story about Anthony himself, who lived to 93 and worked with the WHO on River Blindness eradication in West Africa, which is a cool fact, but also gives you an immediate idea of the figure behind the brand's inspiration.

Each product detail page includes a short taste description, best-use context, prep instructions, and the Anthony's Promise line, which is always "just 100% of the ingredient." The goal was to make the site do what the packaging does in miniature, which is introduce the product, remove the friction of not knowing how to use it, and let the customer feel like they're being walked through something rather than sold to.

The site is a self-hosted WordPress build designed with Elementor Pro, and I built and tested for responsiveness on mobile as well as desktop so the experience holds together on the device most customers are actually shopping from.