THE WORK/

Tetley Colour Therapy

John Street, the strategy partner for the world-known brand Tetley came to Oddly with a challenge – find the way to express the healing message of their client’s tea to the modern consumer.

We got to work on the problem straight away, coming up with a strategy that would interest new demographics while respecting the venerable brand – one of the oldest in the world. Our journey took us into the rich past of the Tetley tea company, and forward to what modern people seek most in their quiet times.

The end product, many iterations later, is a site that allows the visitor to examine their own mood and compare it to the prevailing mood in the area of Canada where they live.  They can look at the updates of others and see what is happening to affect the mood.  And they can select a tea that is perfect for the emotions they are currently feeling.

Behind the Scenes

There is a lot going on behind the scenes of the Tetley Colour Therapy site. Oddly created custom code that reaches out into a variety of social media APIs to find public posts.  It filters them geographically, then runs mood-finding algorithms against the data.  From this, it interpolates the mood of a particular region.

The mood information is matched numerically against colours and dynamically represented on the map of Canada. A select number of specific tweets are pulled from the pool of data and mapped to cities within the geographic regions shown on the map.

There is another set of custom algorithms in place for product recommendation, again based on sentiment, but this time the sentiment is determined by the sliders the user pulls back and forth to estimate their specific emotions.

A Look and Feel

The math and API work behind the Tetley site is sophisticated, but the graphic design was specifically planned to give a feel that is uncluttered, and unhurried. Animation was timed to give a feeling of calm – a refreshing pause that may come at any point during the day.

Like the tea itself, the site is specifically designed to adapt to the mood of the visitor and reflect the mood of a community in general. Definitely one of the most interesting project we’ve worked on, and we at Oddly are glad to have been a part of it.