ReefAsta is a single-product supplement brand owned by Pacific Bio, an Australian biotechnology company better known for treating wastewater with macroalgae. We gave the product a brand look of its own and designed the Shopify store it sells through.
Pacific Bio’s core business is environmental technology: native macroalgae used to strip nutrients from wastewater, sequester carbon and generate Reef Credits, with the resulting biomass going into biostimulants and biofuels. ReefAsta is astaxanthin, a carotenoid derived from algae, and it represents the company’s step from industrial science into a consumer product sold directly to the public.
The brief
One product, no existing consumer brand, and a parent company whose visual language was built for industry and investors rather than shoppers.
The packaging was already settled and was not changing. What ReefAsta needed was everything around it: a look that would hold up on a website, in photography and across a stockist network, and a store that could carry a single product without feeling thin.
The approach
We designed the brand’s visual world rather than its packaging. Art direction, colour and an image style that connected the product to where it comes from, without defaulting to the clinical conventions of the supplement aisle.
From there, wireframes and site design. A single-product store is a specific design problem. There is no category browsing to fall back on and no range to create interest, so the entire job falls to sequence: what a visitor needs to understand, and in what order, before buying something they have not heard of. We structured the site around that question, with room for the science, the story and the stockist network.
Development ran with Net Ninjas and Decode on Shopify.
The results
The store is live and trading, supported by a stockist network alongside direct sales. The brand look runs across the site and the product photography, giving a single line item from a B2B science company a consumer presence it did not previously have.
Why this project matters to us
Science businesses are usually excellent at the thing they make and underserved when it comes to selling it. The distance between what Pacific Bio knows about algae and what a shopper needs to feel before buying is exactly the kind of translation problem we like.
It is also a reminder that brand work is not always a logo. The packaging never changed. What changed was everything around it.
If you have a product that is scientifically sound and commercially invisible, that is a brand and ecommerce problem rather than a product one. We would love to talk.
