Health drinks lead with the health claim. Living Things leads with energy. The brand earns attention through how it looks and feels, then delivers the functional story once you're already interested. This inverts the category logic: most gut health brands ask you to care about prebiotics and then try to make the packaging bearable. Living Things makes you want the can and lets the two billion live cultures be the reward you discover after. The feeling is specific: the pleasure of finding something new before anyone else has.

The name was chosen from hundreds of options. "Living Things" references the live cultures in the product while avoiding the clinical naming conventions of the category. It is biological without being medicinal. The bespoke wordmark is designed to feel alive in the letterforms themselves, carrying the vitality the name promises. Bold colour and illustrative stickers replace the white space and clean sans-serifs that gut health brands default to, while irreverent photography breaks from the category's polished product shots and aspirational wellness imagery. The packaging had to work in an East London cafe and a supermarket meal deal. It solves for both by being distinctive rather than coding for either premium or mass.

The identity launched across packaging, retail and digital for three flavours (now four). It operates in independent cafes, health food shops and supermarket shelves, holding its personality across contexts that would normally demand different design approaches. The illustrative stickers and bold colour system give the brand enough range to flex across social, point of sale and new product extensions without rebuilding the visual language each time.

Living Things won The Grocer's Label & Pack Design of the Year 2024 in its first year. It became a cult favourite in London health shops and now sells in twelve markets including the UK, Ireland, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the Czech Republic. Investment from Spadel, BrewDog's James Watt and former Coca-Cola executives followed. Prebiotic sodas that lead with functional credentials and clean-label aesthetics now occupy a narrower shelf appeal: they speak to the already-converted. Living Things speaks to everyone who wants a great drink and happens to find out it's good for them.