About
Smilegreens is a passion project of mine - or rather, of my entire family. It is a microgreens farm started by my father, and every member of the Ryu family does their part to grow the business. We supply our hand-grown, organically raised produce to local restaurants and supermarkets.
My Role
Aside from sales, marketing, watering, mixing fertilizers and soil, washing grow trays, and dozens more, I play the "son" part of "I have a son who graduated from art school, and he knows how to do art stuff" for our humble yet tightly-ran operation.
Our microgreens are grown on a special, proprietary soil & fertilizer mix inside a meticulously calibrated indoor facility, which is basically my dad's massively overhauled basement with a perfectly controlled humidity, temperature, wind, and grow light.
The name Smilegreens was chosen mostly due to it being the only name option that still had an online domain available, but also captures what we stand for: we want to grow happy greens for happy customers. I wanted to make a playful yet premium wordmark paired with an abstract symbol version of the farm's mascot, Smiley.
We are currently taking suggestions for a better name for our mascot, so if you think you've got a better one (which, honestly, shouldn't be that hard), please send us an email at hello@smilegreens.com. I'm serious.
We are currently taking suggestions for a better name for our mascot, so if you think you've got a better one (which, honestly, shouldn't be that hard), please send us an email at hello@smilegreens.com. I'm serious.
Sketches of Smiley and his plant friends. The final version of Smiley is the third one in the middle.
From what I've researched, most of the microgreens available in retail were focusing on the "future-ness" and "next generation of farming" aspects for their branding, so I wanted to approach with a warmer, friendlier neighborhood farm image. An honest, transparent introduction of our small farm seemed perfectly compatible with a series of character illustrations to represent the farm itself and the greens we grow.
For most of the illustrations, it features our mascot, Smiley, having a chill time with its produce friend, dazzled with the microgreens equivalent of the said produce. Another important rule was that everyone must be smiling, because why wouldn't they?
Label variations for local restaurants
Label variations for retail/supermarkets
To minimize the cost of packaging, we took the route of ordering batches of small labels that can be placed on any container. I also designed a separate version for the retail version, which we only started recently, to include barcodes and a little bit more information, which were something that wasn't necessary for local restaurant distribution.
Promotional posters that feature menus from our restaurant clients that use our microgreens as an ingredient.
Snippets from the one-page marketing website. We are currently in a process of updating our site to include ecommerce features.