BOTANIKS™: ORGANIC BRANDING, PRODUCT, MARKETING & eCOMMERCE

Brand Designer

Packaging Designer

eCommerce Marketer

Adobe Suite

Canva

Shopify

botaniks.mx

Our shop was built with very dedicated information of the origin, process and especially a thorough study on the health benefits that each product brings to the organism. It was not only to promote great quality products, facilitate income to farmers and myself while collaboration with our talents happened but to educate the public on what the importance of choosing the best elements of nutrition available in organic products like the minerals, the vitamins and other indispensable nutrients in real food. It was very peculiar that most of our clients where foreigners living in Mexico, used to searching the web for local and organic pure products, whereas in Mexico people are still considering "natural" food healthy, for lack of information precisely in the real damages of processed foods and the ingredients that are available in supermarkets.

We used WhatsApp the most to promote this products since in Mexico it is the largest marketplace platform available through groups and the business version of the app.

BANNERS

CREATING THE CONCEPT AND THE FIRST PRODUCT

Creating the labels and product design of the Vanilla Extract was the first stage of the project. The labels have a hand drawn illustration that I aimed to resemble victorian labels combined with the natural vines of Vanilla and my own graphic style, I was very happy with the result because the bottle and the frame matched to perfection! This looks got me lots of sales in the marketplace, since all my competition of Mexican Vanilla Extract look absolutely generic, soul-less. This was clearly the influence in the perception of the public about the origin, quality and purity of the product we carry in the shop.

I decided to create the pictures for the products with my own capacities since my objective was to show the real products, non edited, non greenwashed, just the real deal the clients will get and to keep it as artisanal and real for Botaniks.

We achieved first place in Google search results from 2021 until 2024. That was awesome! It brought organic clients constantly without any need to invest in marketing or ads since our production was limited and sales grew by client's recommendations.

Respecting the artisanal origin of the products, the whole branding was handmade as well. The first application was the Vanilla Extract and the labels for it. This was always the premium product since it is truly hard to get PURE extract from the community's farms which produce it as a collective and sold this in bulk and unlabeled, loosing all the value of their privileged land and culture which is the only one that has used vanilla pretty much as people today use medicinal cannabis. This extraordinary orchid endemic of Papantla, Veracruz has to be fertilized by hand at very early hours and on the precise time. The beans are cut green and spend up to 1 year drying slowly in the sun and creating the oils that produce its amazing smell. I seriously went deep on this, I am absolutely in love with it! I use it for everything, everyday, since 2017, a privilege!

HOW BOTANIKS.MX WAS CREATED AND WHAT IT BECAME!

During the pandemic and economic stress of 2021, I partnered with farmers around Mexico to sell their products with branding and eCommerce. I created the branding, ideas, packaging, process products, marketing, sales, shipping and customer service.

I payed myself with the profit I was able to get from the resale of their natural and ancestral local products. In 2023 shipping, scamming and other factors started growing and things started to get more complicated.

This project allowed us to get a great passive income in this eStore that became for 3 years the top Google search result in our best selling products, the Pure Vainilla Extract from Papantla, Veracruz (the endemic town of Vanilla beans in the planet!) and Organic Epsom Salts (imported).

Sadly this 2024 we shut down the store because inflation made it impossible to compete and the delivery of packages became a serious problem due to identity theft and the stealing of the products. Our regular clients were also sad, because we were already priced high as a quality, artisanal, organic product directly from the farmers so we couldn't become a viable business for all involved in the state of the economy in the whole country.

Climate change and mistakes from Mexican Government management in safety and the one month oil leak on the ancestral lands of the Vainilla communities, destroyed the family lands and intoxicated the Vainilla orchids to an absolute ecological disaster.

This has been one of the saddest realities to grasp, both salt from Colima filled with micro-plastics to the sugar cane and coffee from Veracruz affected by the air spraying of Glyphosate are making a true national loss of the ancestral cultures of food production, making the farmland barren and dry to the roots after deforestation, water pollution and fracking all over the country.

I don't believe we have ever experienced such tough to handle problems that will take us years of collaborations to fix. I will just keep on keeping on, never giving up to life and love!

The farmers, their products and myself will try to bring this project to a different level, exporting the products to North America and Europe. That process is ongoing...