Tea Lab

Build a bubble tea café that feels like nature indoors, in a grey city that lacks one

The brief arrived narrow and emotional: a bubble tea & coffee café for Belgium that offers something the existing chains do not. The pilot location is earmarked at Quellinstraat 3, Antwerp. My scope was brand strategy and visual identity — not a business plan. I owned the thinking from vision and mission through to the cup in a customer’s hand: the metaphor, the verbal identity, the logo, the packaging system, the pitch, the motion films, and the spring launch campaign. Michael Rosenblatt art-directed.

Two things make the concept land specifically in Belgium: the weather (long, grey, wet stretches most of the year; very little air-conditioning in hospitality) and a proven bubble tea wave — Gong cha’s Benelux master franchisee has publicly targeted roughly 50 stores by 2030; Chatime and 8tea5 already operate across Antwerp, Brussels, Ghent and Liège. Demand is not the question. Distinctiveness is.

Concept / pre-launch. Pilot site: Quellinstraat 3, Antwerp. Handle: @tealab.be

One insight, one metaphor, one creative opponent — then everything else

Strategy came before any visuals. The process board opened with vision and mission, then moved to values, metaphor, and the creative opponent. The insight that anchors everything: Belgium has grey, wet weather for roughly three-quarters of the year and very little indoor air-conditioning — so a space that feels like nature indoors, whatever the sky is doing, is a real emotional product, beyond décor.

For young urban Belgians worn down by a grey, noisy city, Tea Lab is the bubble tea & coffee café that offers a natural oasis to reset in for 10–30 minutes, in any weather — because unlike fast, sugary, plastic-feeling chains, Tea Lab sells calm and freshness, with the drink as the vehicle

Naming the creative opponent early kept every later choice honest. Tea Lab refuses three things: sugar overload (sickly, candy-coloured drinks), plastic vibe (disposable, soulless interiors and packaging), and too kawaii (cartoonish cuteness with no calm). Every identity decision was tested against those three filters before it moved forward. Motto candidates — Sip & Reset, Fresh Tea Quiet Mind, Nature in a Cup — all reinforce the same small-reset promise, not a sugar rush.

Five nature scenes as an operating system, not a mood board

The organising idea is the café as an oasis. Rather than one generic green look, the metaphor becomes a five-scene system — Forest, Desert, Snow, Garden, Coast — each a different mood of calm that can headline a season, a store, a campaign or a flavour while the oasis idea holds them together. Forest (green, shaded, quiet) is the flagship default; Desert (warm, still, sunlit) owns summer; Snow (crisp, clean, calm) takes winter; Garden (fresh, alive, tended) runs spring; Coast (open, breezy, releasing) carries refreshers. The system lets the brand flex across seasons without re-designing.

Forest — flagship / default world

Desert — summer & fruit

The Tea Lab wordmark sits inside the natural scenes as a calm, confident mark; the word oasis recurs as a lowercase motif. The cup is the brand’s most-seen surface — a moving billboard. The system runs a consistent cup with flavour-coded variants (matcha, peach, mango, lychee, brown boba), each tied back to the natural palette. Packaging deliberately avoids the glossy, throwaway feel of the creative opponent. A tight, readable menu — The Original Boba, Brown Boba, Matcha Latte, Mango, Peach, Lychee, plus toasts — signals natural and fresh without a word of copy.

Cup system — matcha

Cup system — mango

The rabbit films — calm, warm and not quite kawaii

The mascot does the emotional work the static identity can’t — and it works best moving. Short, art-directed films place the Tea Lab rabbit (and the coastal otter) inside the natural scenes with the cup: calm, warm and cute without tipping into the kawaii the brand rejects. The same films double as animated scene transitions in the 44-slide pitch deck and as vertical social clips. A second set of motion pieces places the brand’s signage, storefronts and interiors inside the worlds.

Motion poster — forest

Motion poster — desert

The spring Garden launch — a coherent feed, not loose posts

The launch campaign runs on the Garden scene — spring flowers, fresh greens and the season’s drinks (rose & lychee, strawberry mint, peach). It was designed as a coherent feed: rabbit Reels and Stories (9:16) as hero motion, a “TEA LAB” wordmark spelled in flowers on moss as the spring signature image, product and atmosphere stills, and a community moment to seed warmth. The whole set was mocked up as the live @tealab.be profile grid so the feed could be judged as a single composition rather than as isolated images.

Garden — spring scene. The campaign ran on @tealab.be

What worked, what I’d do differently, and where the brand stops

Naming the creative opponent early was the single highest-leverage decision. It made every downstream choice — typography weight, packaging finish, mascot affect — a binary: does this feel natural and restful, or does it slide toward plastic and kawaii? Designing a system of five scenes rather than a single logo gave the brand room to grow without re-designing. Leading with the weather insight made the concept feel necessary, not decorative.

What I’d do differently: pair the identity with real interior and storefront mock-ups — atmosphere is the product, so it deserves spatial proof, not just cups and posters. Pressure-test the menu and price points against the named Antwerp competitors (Boba Club, Bubble Bar, Momen’Tea) before opening. And add the operational layer (site economics, pricing, staffing, metrics) as a companion document so the concept is investable, not just beautiful. This case is brand strategy and identity; the go-to-market is a separate document.

The differentiation is an idea, not a feature — harder to build, but far harder for a chain to copy

Process board — strategy first, visuals second. Tools: Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, generative AI, Cinema 4D