Gatorade

Packaging, Shopper Marketing, Digital Ads

BRIEF: Gatorade’s Innovation Team needed to launch Drinkfinity, a concentrated pod system for elite teams, starting with the Brazil National Football Team at the World Cup. Each cardboard tube held six pods with different formulas used by the team’s nutritionist to mix custom blends for athletes in real time.

CHALLENGE: The Innovation Team worked with an outside agency to complete the design but their designs didn’t provide successful solutions. The team came to me as their last hope as their only in-house designer. I was tasked with creating a complete packaging system in one day to meet print deadlines for the World Cup.

RESEARCH: There were no existing competitors that I was aware of and with no time to explore I relied on my deep knowledge of the Gatorade brand to begin this project.

APPROACH: Since the packaging did not have to do the usual job of retail packs, I built a strict information hierarchy for one user — the team’s nutritionist. I prioritized formula and flavor, designed a modular system that could scale with new offerings, and aligned every decision to how staff read, select and combine pods during practices and high-stakes games.

RESULTS & IMPACT: Drinkfinity launched successfully with the Brazilian football team and then rolled out to other professional teams. The project proved how fast, focused in-house design can outperform agency work when it centers the real user, and it showcased how packaging, UX, and information design can turn a complex system into an intuitive sideline tool.

SOLUTION: I designed all seven pod labels and seven tube casings and released final files to print on schedule. I treated the tube as an interaction: pods come out from the top, perforations remove sections as they’re used, and I anchored critical information at the bottom so it stays visible until the last pod leaves the tube.