Oatly packaging, 2015–

Forsman & Bodenfors:

Oatly is a Swedish manufacturer of oat based foods and drinks. A tiny company with huge ambitions. They have a lot to say and want to be in the middle of the discussion concerning sustainability and health. The only problem is that their media budget is, to put it mildly, limited. Which is why we decided to treat the packaging as Oatly’s main media channel, as an advertising space in itself.

Over the last five years, Oatly has been taking the world by storm as many consumer’s favorite milk alternative (including mine). Near the beginning of their exponential growth in 2015, the company hired Swedish firm Forsman & Bodenfors to completely overhaul their identity and packaging. On US shelves, at least, the cartons really stand out, clearly indicating that Oatly is a different kind of product and very unconventional company. The informal design perfectly matches the irreverent copywriting, which frequently wears the founders’ independent personality and environmental politics in its sleeve. In other words, as their branding video puts it, “All this made us feel less like a corporation, and more like a collection of real people.”

The headlines are a mix of lettering and custom typefaces, including John Rounded (named after Oatly creative director John Schoolcraft) and Toni Grotesk (named after Oatly founder Toni Petersson). The type was designed by Lars Elfman, who was responsible for the other lettering, with font development by Caroline Laudon and art direction by Christoffer Persson. The text is set in FF Magda, Cornel Windlin’s distressed take on the Cubic typewriter style.

John Schoolcraft:

Why don’t we look we just made these packages ourselves in the basement? And then people will pick them up in the shop and say “What’s this?” And it they turn the side of the package, the idea is they will start to read, and if they start to read then they have to buy it.