Tim Coughlin, the founder of Tim’s, continued to develop his mother’s Canadian recipes from his native Ontario. What began with a small stand at a weekly market in Berlin has become a real success story, with Tim’s products now being sold in large delicatessen shops and trendy cafés throughout Berlin. Despite the large volumes, they are still baked with a lot of love, by hand and without preservatives. In addition to Canadian-style biscuits and cakes, Tim’s also produces gourmet burger rolls and has been successfully supplying Berlin restaurants with them for years. He has now developed a baking mix available at popular supermarkets, giving end-consumers the opportunity to enjoy his buns.

Hajok Design was briefed for both the relaunch of the sweet pastry range and, in a second project, the launch of the burger buns. The previous packaging design for the sweet pastries had looked quite industrial and impersonal. Hajok’s creative work was to change this: the task was to reflect the hand-crafted character of the products on-pack. The passion and great care taken in making the biscuits and cakes was to be highlighted with a special colour scheme and typography. The burger buns are a real product innovation: here the goal was to adapt the packaging design to be closer to the look of the sweet pastries yet still visually set them apart.

The pastel shades, handwritten logo and a hand-drawn portrait of Tim’s mother Flora Jane – all of which radiates the approachable, welcoming values of the brand, delighting consumers not only with the contents, but also with the appealing packaging design. The small seal uniting Canada and Berlin stands for the high quality of the products. The burger buns are also presented with a hand-written name, yet with a colour scheme aimed more at a male target group. Consumers are drawn into the burger world with a high quality, masculine design displaying the image of a very appetising burger. This is a perfect symbiosis of the hand-made character and the category codes of a barbecue product.