Kola Goodies
Roles - Creative Direction, Photography and Production
The client
Kola Goodies is a Sri Lankan tea brand whose core products — Milk Tea, Masala Chai Latte, and the new Maple Chai — are rooted in a tea tradition that doesn't get the visual treatment it deserves. The brand's challenge is one shared by most chai companies in the western market: coffee gets shown in endlessly inventive, desirable ways, and chai largely doesn't. A collaboration with comedian and creator Lilly Singh for her Lilly's Library holiday gift box created the opportunity and the deadline to change that.
The brief
Two deliverables in one shoot day: holiday imagery for the Kola Goodies x Lilly's Library Maple Chai gift box, and a set of evergreen images for the OG product line — Milk Tea and Masala Chai Latte — to live on the website. The holiday images had a color direction shaped partly by Lilly Singh's agency, which set parameters on what could be used. The tone both the client and I aligned on within those parameters was the same: luxurious, grown-up, timeless holiday — nothing tacky. Everything shot, edited, and delivered within a week. The marketing timeline had already started.
The challenge
Maple Chai was a new product with no visual language around it. The client came to me with a genuine question: chai is almost always shown the same way — is there a way to make it look more fun? I looked at coffee photography for the answer, because coffee has been shot with so much invention and desire for so long. The gap between how coffee looks and how chai looks in most brand imagery is a creative opportunity, and this project was the chance to close it.
The honeycomb idea came from that thinking. Maple honeycombs piled into the chai, finished with a maple drip shot. No reference existed for it — it was a concept built from the brief and executed on the day, including a real-time race to capture it before the heat of the studio lights caused the honeycomb to melt. It worked.
The secondary challenge was logistics: a holiday shoot and an evergreen shoot completed in the same day, on a tight budget, with just the founder and me on set.
For the evergreen images I also recommended having iced chai on her website since all of the imagery were warm chais (traditional). It’s a marketing hook for the audience in the west since iced drinks are more popular, and we implemented that.
The process
The client came in with strong visual references alongside the brief, which made the mood board process collaborative from the start. I sourced fabric backdrops to match the color mood and parameters; the client handled Kola Goodies-branded mugs that we worked together on. I directed the styling and built the environment around them throughout the day.
My pre-production process on every shoot is extensive by design. I work through roughly 85% of the creative decisions before shoot day — shot list, schedule, props, surfaces, sequencing — and deliberately leave around 10% room for creativity on the day and 5% for anything that goes sideways. That structure is what makes shoot days run cleanly, especially when the timeline is compressed. This one wrapped ahead of schedule.
The outcome
The images were published across the Kola Goodies website, social channels, newsletters, and picked up in publications. The client was happy with the results.The evergreen images for the original product line round out the project as a second layer of deliverables built to last beyond the campaign.
Creative POV
The honeycomb shot is a useful example of how I approach a brief when no reference exists. The question wasn't what chai usually looks like — it was what it could look like if it were given the same creative attention as coffee. That reframe is where the concept came from. The pre-production discipline that made it executable on a one-day, one-person shoot is the other half of the story: the creative idea only lands when the production is tight enough to support it.