Village2Urban: designing and printing labels for a whole FMCG range

Village2Urban is a natural foods brand with the problem every growing FMCG company eventually hits: the range outgrows the design. A logo and a nice first label will carry you through four products. By the twentieth SKU, if there is no system underneath, you have twenty labels that were each designed on their own day and a shelf that looks like a wholesale market. Our job was to replace that with one visual language flexible enough to carry oils, jars, tubs and mini-jars without a redesign every launch.

Start with the container, not the artwork

A label system lives or dies on formats. A 1-litre oil bottle, a 400g murabba jar, a jaggery tub and a 10g saffron mini-jar have nothing in common in terms of surface area, curve or label shape — so the system cannot be a fixed layout. Instead we defined a hierarchy that scales: brand block, product name, variant, weight, then the mandatory panels. On the mini-jar, the hierarchy compresses to three elements. On the oil bottle, it expands. The recognisable part stays the same in both.

• One hierarchy applied across bottles, jars, tubs and mini-jars
• Illustrated ingredient cues to tell SKUs apart at a glance
• Ingredient, nutrition, FSSAI and batch panels designed in, not squeezed in
• Colour used per category rather than per product, so shelf blocks stay readable
• Label shapes and sizes matched to the actual containers being bought

Zaytin: a premium sub-brand inside the same family

Zaytin is the premium dates line, and it needed to feel like a gift rather than a grocery item — while still belonging to the same house. We designed a logotype pairing an Arabic calligraphic mark with a wide-set Latin wordmark, then set it in an olive-green and gold palette built for foil. One label architecture now carries Ajwa, Kalmi and Medjool, with the jumbo and seedless call-outs designed into the hierarchy rather than stickered on afterwards.

A label system is not a template. It is a set of decisions you never have to make again.

Printing is part of the design job

Because we print in-house, the artwork was built for the press from the first draft. Clear PET tubs need a different approach to a matte-coated bottle label; a design that looks rich on white paper can go grey on transparent film. Adhesive choice matters too — an oil bottle handled with oily fingers, or a tub that goes into a fridge, will peel a label that was specified for a dry pantry shelf. These are not glamorous decisions, but they are the difference between a brand that looks premium in a photo and one that still looks premium in a customer's kitchen.

• Artwork adjusted per substrate — film, coated paper, transparent tub labels
• Adhesive and finish specified for the product's real handling and storage
• Colour proofed on the actual stock before the run
• Variable data zones for batch, weight and best-before locked into the layout
• Brochure and catalogue designed and printed from the same visual system

The lesson for growing food brands

If you plan to add SKUs — and every food brand does — pay for the system once instead of paying for a label twenty times. Give your designer the full product roadmap, not just the first three items. Insist on printed proofs. And keep design and printing under one roof if you can; most of the FMCG label problems we get called in to fix are the gap between what a designer sent and what a printer could actually produce. We do both from our studio in Okhla, New Delhi, for brands across Delhi NCR, Noida and Gurgaon.