Sable & Ash

Sable & Ash roast in small batches and change their line constantly, which is a nightmare for conventional packaging. Their previous solution was a single generic bag with a sticker, and the stickers had multiplied to the point where the shelf read as clutter rather than as range.

The constraint that shaped everything was economic: they could afford one print run a year and one press pass with two inks. So the bags carry no origin information at all. What they carry is a field — a two-ink overprint that produces a third colour where the inks cross — and the origin, roast date and tasting notes go on a thermal label the roastery prints itself, in the same alphabet, at the moment the bag is filled.

That split turned out to be the whole idea. The permanent layer is expensive-looking and completely stable; the volatile layer is cheap, fast and obviously provisional. A customer can tell at a glance which information is the roaster's promise and which is this week's news, and the roastery stopped paying for print runs it threw away.

We chose the two inks by printing forty overprint pairs on the actual stock and letting the roasters pick in daylight in their own shop, which took an afternoon and settled an argument that had been running for a month. The resulting third colour is not one either of them would have chosen on a screen.

The system has since absorbed a subscription box, a filter range and two collaborations without a new print run, which is the only durability test that matters here.