Well, this certainly isn’t something you see every day: a giant packet of chia seeds standing in a doorway. But it happened!
This project was commissioned to promote the company’s health food snacks in various locations where they have licensed outlets. We had to create, deliver and install the giant packet of chia seeds to one of the more illustrious stores in Kensington, London.
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The sculpture
We sculpted the shape of the packet in polystyrene. At 8 foot high, this is one big prop packet of seeds -
The mould
We made a 2-part mould of the polystyrene sculpture -
Sanding the fibreglass
Once we had cast a fibreglass packet from the mould we had to sand it until we ended up with a lovely smooth surface as we were going to apply conformable vinyl to the finished piece. -
See-through plastic window
The middle section was taken away and reinforced so that we could vacuum form clear plastic over it. The machine used to vacuum form uses tons of pressure and will easily crush a fibreglass structure. The clear plastic section is the pane of clear plastic on seed packets that displays the contents inside. -
Seeds
Here is the clear plastic window with a layer of real seed inside so that the finished packet, once it has had the vinyl applied will look exactly like the real thing. -
The conformable vinyl
The printed, conformable vinyl being applied. To stay true to the original packet we asked The Chia Company to send us the original artwork used for their seed packets and we scaled it up so that it would fit a packet over 100 times its original size. -
Taking the stage
The completed packet in pride of place in the Wholefoods Market window for all the shoppers walking down Kensington High Street are tempted to buy their own, smaller pack.
How did we do it?
This project had its challenges; however, as a repeat customer of ours, this company knew that the team here at Spur Creative could pull it off and get them exactly what they wanted.
As you can see, we made the packet incredibly realistic; we wanted to make the packet look as though it had product seen through the viewing pane. We created this illusion by using the real product glued to the inside of a clear sheet of acrylic; this was something we’d never done before, working with real food, so it was nerve wracking not knowing what the glue or humidity would do to the real seed, but it all turned out ok.
Replicating the imagery was something else our team had to execute. Making something at a giant scale like this was an interesting task. There was nothing but a tiny picture of the original (and much smaller-sized) packaging to work from, which had its problems – but what’s a job without a slight challenge?
We made a mould of the polystyrene sculpture of the seed packet, then cast in fibreglass, leaving room for the seeds to go, then put a vinyl wrap of the artwork over the beautifully smooth sanded fibreglass packet
The result
We think you’ll agree that our packet of chia seeds looks good enough to eat – and we’re very proud of that fact. With everything from the logo to the nutritional value information on the back, this packet was a perfect replica and was highly praised by the client and other health food lovers too!
