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CREATIVE DIRECTION | BRAND Design AND STRATEGY
More Than Chin Chin
Building the brand system behind Gratia and The Flourishing Treats Company.
What I did: Built the parent identity and packaging system for The Flourishing Treats Company as Creative Director, working independently through ECOE Studios, covering the company profile, the Gratia packaging system across formats, and the peanut burger and Africa's Finest extensions.
Outcome: The identity remained in active use as the company expanded its product range, pack sizes, and market presence. Later evidence includes Nigerian and UK retail listings, Air Peace route coverage, and a 2026 Bank of Industry feature documenting the company's operational growth.
Scope: Parent company mark, company profile, Gratia packaging across pack sizes, peanut burger and Africa's Finest packaging extensions, production dimensioning with packaging partners.
CONTEXT
The Flourishing Treats Company is a Lagos food manufacturer built around Gratia, its flagship chin chin brand. By 2022 the business was outgrowing its earlier identity and preparing for a wider retail footprint, translating a familiar West African fried snack into a flake format for modern shelves.
I saw Gratia sitting beside products such as cornflakes and oats, and established brands like Cerelac and Golden Morn, not competing only within the chin chin category. A peanut burger extension and a separate regional brand, Africa's Finest, were already coming behind it, so the parent company needed an identity capable of holding more than one product line.
PROBLEM
On paper the brief was five separate items: a parent mark, a company profile, Gratia packaging, a peanut burger pack, and Africa's Finest. The real problem was holding three demands on the same six square inches without any one winning.
Familiarity: keep the nostalgia chin chin already carries
Ambition: let Gratia compete beside established brands, not just other chin chin
Regulation: carry ingredients, allergens, NAFDAC information, and a barcode without burying appetite
ROLE
I led the visual direction across the parent identity, packaging system, and product extensions as Creative Director, working independently through ECOE Studios. I also worked directly with packaging producers to translate the system into production-ready dimensions for international shipping.
APPROACH
The company set the colour direction. I owned everything it touched after: look, feel, and the placement of every detail. Turquoise anchored the core range, orange marked the peanut burger, yellow gave Africa's Finest its own regional register. Colour told people which product they were looking at. Look and feel was the harder thing to get right, and I protected it against pressure to simplify.
The harder call was how much nostalgia to put on the front of the pack. Leading with sentiment would have made Gratia familiar, but it risked reducing it to a memory of chin chin rather than a brand competing in its own right. I pushed for nostalgia as a glimpse, not the whole pitch, carried mostly through the copy while the pack itself stayed direct and product-led.
I also pushed for reusability over a single fixed look. Locking one design and repeating it across every run would have been faster, but a pack that shifts slightly with each new flavour gives the brand a reason to catch the eye again at the point of sale. Retention isn't one fixed image, it's enough range to feel alive without losing what makes it Gratia.
None of that mattered without the object matching the ambition. I worked directly with production partners to resolve the dimensions, ensuring the hierarchy survived manufacturing rather than being compressed into a stock format. The goal was for Gratia to feel considered from the moment someone picked it up.
OUTCOME
The work moved past mockups into production files the company could print and ship. Gratia became a repeatable system across pack sizes and adjacent products, and The Flourishing Treats Company gained an identity built to hold more than one line.
There's no data tied to this specific engagement, so the company's later growth isn't claimed as a result of the design work. What can be shown is that the identity stayed in place as the company scaled well past the size it was built for.
The public evidence shows the system entered the market and stayed there. The current company website and Gratia Instagram account still run the circular TFTC seal, the handwritten Gratia wordmark, the turquoise packaging, and the line, "It's not just chin chin, it's Gratia."
Supermart Nigeria lists the product in 30g, 45g, and 1kg formats. Surulere Foods in the United Kingdom carries individual and bulk formats. Independent reporting named Gratia among the Nigerian products gaining exposure through Air Peace's Lagos to London operations.
A 2026 Bank of Industry feature reported that new investment in machinery more than doubled the company's output and expanded employment. That growth belongs to the company and its operational investment, not to the identity work. Its relevance here is that the brand system stayed intact as the organisation scaled well beyond the size it was built for.
Smaller signals point the same direction. One consumer asked where to find Gratia in Abuja, another posted that they wanted a pack. Individual examples, not campaign metrics, but the kind of thing that doesn't happen around a brand nobody remembers.
This was never only a packaging job. It was the argument for what a growing manufacturer needed to look like before it could compete past its own category.
