Vita Coco was founded in 2003, unleashing the coconut water wars. By 2010, it had become the best-selling coconut water brand worldwide. The following years were focused on building buzz, as Vita Coco became a household staple and attracted super-fans and celebrity investors like Madonna, Rihanna, and Kelly Slater. It was around this time that I met Ed. He had been the sole in-house designer for a few years and was struggling to keep up with demands. I was traveling around Venezuela and Argentina when I applied for the job as a joke.

Our time at Vita Coco spanned five years, even though we only overlapped for one of them. We progressively added new team members and agency partners as I grew into my first Art Director role. During that time, I accomplished a lot of great foundational work for the brand together with the team. We've all stayed friends and continue to work together on special projects.

In this Case Story, I’ll take you on a vintage Vita Coco ride, from Madonna to Jane Lynch to Chrissy Teigen, highlighting our most popular campaigns and experiences, as well as the brand's packaging evolution.

Upon arrival, I learned a great deal about the impressive setup that Ed had created for the team. He had built a Wufoo form that automatically fed into Trello, which in turn connected to Evernote so that the broader team could preview our work visually, as better features did not exist at the time. I was impressed and forever caught the DesignOps bug of practicing agile workflows and continuously improving process as new features appeared.

My first priority was to establish a good Creative Library on Dropbox to match the process. Our files had gone through the hands of several freelancers and random agencies, resulting in a disorganized structure. I provided a new framework that was so awesome that it’ll serve as the basis of this journey.

Coconut water is now widely known for its numerous benefits, as is coconut oil. However, when we were first starting out, our main marketing challenge was educating consumers about our product. To address this, our team created "Coco Notes"—educational brochures that were distributed at events or in-store and street activations, along with product samples. The materials featured an adorable coconut character who explained things in a fun and engaging way. Below is a sample of the printed versions of our Coco Notes, as well as a great explainer video.

Eventually, we realized that it would be more effective to create a smaller 200ml sample Tetra Pak that included all of the educational information. This was Ed's final major project at Vita Coco. He still proudly holds one of the first physical samples the company received.

Packaging was the area where we focused most of our internal efforts from the beginning. One of the biggest challenges for packaging was to ensure that the creative looked right across the entire range, from the smallest 330ml packs to the largest 1L designs, while using the same elements and considering the different flavors. We had to take into account many different languages and ensure that they felt consistent with the brand.

Ed and Rhea were responsible for some really cool flavor evolutions, such as Lemonade and Lemon Tea, which were inspired by lemonade stand awnings. Kids' packaging was short-lived but fun to work on because it had a different die-line intended to work better for lunch boxes. I worked on numerous variations of Coconut Oil, as well as our largest Coconut Water PET sustainable plastic 1.5L bottle, which posed a challenge in getting the shrink wrap accurately. I also worked on some beautiful packs that were a bit of a departure at the time, such as Coconut Wipes, Lotion, Milk, Yogurt, and Ice Cream! We all had lots of fun with outer cases and custom Variety Packs for big box retailers.

Regarding our internal organization, we referred to anything durable or long-lasting as "sustaining creative" or "hard point-of-sale". This included various items such as truck wraps, sketches for large-scale events or in-store activations, shrink wraps, and hard or corrugated materials that brought displays to life.

We designed coolers, fridges, awnings, many different types of palm trees, and great beach swag. We also enjoyed designing uniforms for our brand ambassadors and their various modes of transportation, ranging from tricycles with fridges in the back to golf carts and larger vehicle wraps with physical coconuts on top. Over the years, we also created numerous influencer kits for product launches.

When we say "seasonal," we mostly mean summer, which is typically when we deployed our largest campaigns and naturally sold the most coconut water. For the most part, we partnered with the team at Madwell, a Brooklyn-based agency. They had a larger creative team that generated very cool campaign ideas. We would then ensure that we had the appropriate production setup to launch the campaign across all printed and digital media and channels.

5 Biggest Campaigns
(while I was there)

• Hydrate Naturally: our first series of iconic ads featuring Rihanna. There were also some lesser-popular posters with Kelly Slater and A-Rod. Happy to show them by appointment only.

• Drafted by Nature: a sports-focused campaign with Julio Jones, Manti Te’o, and Marshawn Lynch.

• Stupidly Simple: this sparked some interesting taglines like "Our Plant is a Plant" and had very cool video ads starring Jane Lynch. These were our first big national TV spots!

• Plant Manager and Intern Contest: where we riffed off the "Our Plant is a Plant" tagline to expand upon a search for a new "Plant Manager" for our company. It featured Chrissy Teigen who also helped us create a first-of-its-kind Snapchat campaign using 3D tracking filters.

• Just Get Thirsty: features a very weird guy singing nonsense karaoke.