A style study — not a real store, not affiliated with DHL · more
Freight Yellow

Chinese tea · courier issue

Tea stamped, striped and numbered

Yellow ground, red italics, a barcode under every leaf. The sheets borrow the graphic language of air freight; the tea itself is Chinese, loose and unflavoured.

Two yellow t-shirts printed with red courier lettering, pu'er clumps in motion blur, a barcode tracking line and a black and yellow hazard stripe at the hem

Seven categories in the manifest

34 teas · 7 categories

Green teaGreen tea5 teasOolongOolong14 teasRed tea (hongcha)Red tea (hongcha)6 teasPu-erhPu-erh4 teasWhite teaWhite tea2 teasTea paste (chagao)Tea paste (chagao)2 teasBuckwheat (not a tea)Buckwheat (not a tea)1 tea

Wear from the same manifest

All tees and hoodies →

Wear — Ālǐshān Zhū Lù CháĀlǐshān Zhū Lù CháWear — Bái JiānBái JiānWear — Passion-Fruit OolongPassion-Fruit OolongWear — Raw Pu-erh PasteRaw Pu-erh PasteWear — Ripe Pu-erh PasteRipe Pu-erh PasteWear — Dà Hóng PáoDà Hóng Páo

Why the shop borrows courier graphics

Freight graphics are the loudest legible system ever printed: red on yellow, italics leaning forward, everything stamped, striped and numbered. The sheets are built from them because a barcode and a batch line say more about a lot of tea than a soft photograph does. The blur behind the leaf is a drawing device; nothing on these pages describes how a parcel travels, how fast, or who carries it, and the livery is a borrowed graphic study with no carrier standing behind it. The pictograms are the useful part, since keep dry and brew near boiling are the two things a dense fermented leaf actually asks for. Under the loud paint the catalogue is plain: Chinese leaf, weighed and coded.