Komorebi
Tea Collective

Komorebi is the Japanese word for sunlight filtering through trees. It's one of those words that doesn't have a direct English translation because it describes a whole feeling at once. I wanted to build a tea brand around a brand that felt like stillness, like slowing down, and like the opposite of the rush everyone is in everyday.

The American market has a matcha problem. It's been commodified and sugared up to the point where the original ritual is kind of lost, and Komorebi was my answer to that with the goal of bringing the stillness of a Kyoto teahouse into a lifestyle that has very little stillness in it.

The logo is a minimalist tea leaf silhouette inside a soft circle, paired with an elegant English logotype and the Japanese characters (木漏れ日) stacked vertically on the packaging. I wanted the mark to feel both modern and timeless, and including the Japanese characters was important because I didn't want the brand to feel like a western interpretation of Japan.

For the surface illustration, I originally used an Asanoha pattern, which is a traditional Japanese geometric print of hemp leaves, but when I sat back to look at it, something kept tugging at me, and I knew it wasn't working. It felt too busy and too flat, like I was just filling the space because the tube couldn't be bare. I was looking through traditional Japanese art for inspiration and was reminded of Sumi-e, which is a style of ink wash landscape painting. Sumi-e is usually mountains and forests rendered in two or three colors at very low opacity, and it's really relaxing to look at. That was the click moment for the tube graphic because I realized it was saying what I needed it to say without saying much, which is as Komorebi as it gets.

The palette followed naturally from there. Soft, layered greens that feel like tea fields seen through morning mist, with gold foil that mirrors morning light for the typographic details.

I originally designed the tea packaging as a metal tin, which is the category convention for premium tea. I also realized, after I had designed the first version, that it wasn't working either, but it took me a while to figure out why. In retrospect the reason was obvious: you can't build a brand around stillness and grounding and put it inside a cold, loud metal container that's annoying and clanks when you set it down. The sound of the material was contradicting the brand promise, so I switched to soft-touch matte paper tubes.

Matte absorbs light and feels warmer in the hand than metal, and the tubes doubled as a canvas for the Sumi-e illustrations so the art felt painted on instead of printed over, which is what was happening when I tried to layer the pattern behind the logo on a hard tin surface.

This thinking carried through to the other touchpoints. The individual sachets are uncoated textured paper, and the mailing box is the same warm matte finish. Even the guide booklet is printed on weighted stock so that every time you touch something Komorebi, it's supposed to feel like the brand is telling you to slow down and just take a minute.

The matcha whisk and the tea guide booklet are both brand extensions, but they work a bit differently in the brand system.

For the whisk, the packaging was the challenge because people already sell matcha whisks, so the question was how to package one in a way that didn't feel like a cheap upsell tucked next to the checkout. I wanted it to feel like a revered tool, like you were being being handed something ceremonial instead of it just being a kitchen tool, and the gold-etched whisk illustration on the box does that. It gives the impression there's something magical inside, and it makes the object part of the introduction to Japanese tea culture.

The guide booklet started as a tri-fold pamphlet, and I scrapped it about halfway through for two reasons. I was trying to fit everything I had learned about Japanese tea (the varieties, the brewing traditions, the history, because while making this I basically had to become a Japanese tea nerd) into a pamphlet and it was impossible. Second, and more importantly, paper feels disposable. Even good paper. People don't feel compelled to keep a pamphlet, they glance at it and throw it out, but a booklet is different. A booklet feels like a keepsake because you'd put it on your kitchen counter, you'd reference it, and you'd actually want to keep it. That change transformed the object from a freebie into a piece of brand education that customers value, which reinforces the whole mission of Komorebi wanting to bring Japan to a busy Western consumer. If the brand is claiming to teach you something, the teaching artifact has to feel like it's worth being taught from.

The social media presence was the easiest part of the system because it was just a matter of extending the philosophy of the brand onto a feed. The same question applies: everyone is already scrolling too fast, how do you make them slow down? Everything Komorebi touches is supposed to feel like a breath, so the Instagram grid had to feel like that too.

The grid balances product photography, tea ceremony moments, landscape imagery, and educational content. The profile icon is a simplified version of the logo because the full leaf decal felt too on-the-nose and too commercial for this placement. The tone is closer to a small art gallery than a retail brand. I deliberately kept customer content off the main grid because while Komorebi loves its customers, repost culture would cheapen the editorial feel, and if the promise of the brand is that you're being taken to Japan to sit in a tea ceremony at home, the Instagram has to feel like that too, not like a storefront.