afterhours
A soda designed for the transition from on → off
Brand Systems Design, Product Design
2026
Product, Positioning & Problem
Modern life has removed most of the natural transition between work and rest. Work follows you home, your phone begs to fill every free second.
Most of the time, people know what they could do with their free time. Read, call a friend, make something, go outside. The problem isn't a lack of options, it's the moment of choice. After a day full of decisions and constant input, leisure becomes just more noise. So you default to your phone.
I noticed that beverages already own transitions: coffee starts work, a drink with dinner creates a pause, tea signals bedtime. But no drink owns that first hour after work, when you transition from work mode to home mode. That's where afterhours lives.
The product is craft soda, but creating a ritual to help you spend your off-hours intentionally is the message.
My Role & Contributions
I developed Afterhours as a solo speculative branding project. I owned everything from positioning, strategy, naming, visual identity, illustration, packaging, copywriting, social strategy, and retail approach.
What interested me was whether a single behavioral insight could carry through an entire system. Could every decision reinforce the same concept?
Key Design Decisions
Positioning around a moment instead of a function. The wellness industry turns rest into another opportunity for optimization. I positioned afterhours around a specific moment - that first hour after work - instead of "a drink that helps you relax" so the brand could be playful and curious instead of instructional. If the brand felt like an authority telling you how to live, people wouldn't respond to it - so I made it feel like a friend reminding you that you're allowed to stop.
The "Permission Slip" system. After a day of decisions, people don't need another choice, they need a nudge to transition from on → off. Every can has a small prompt, saying "If you don't know what to do next, here's an idea." Not a task or prescription, just permission.
The system splits into two collections — familiar flavors with prompts on reconnecting with yourself, or exploratory flavors with prompts on having new experiences.
Rejecting "wellness" as the category. The brand's enemy is "wellness as homework" because the core concept of afterhours is in direct opposition to adding more friction to natural routines. The visual system is bold, irreverent, nostalgic, and warm — the opposite of clinical. The "friend reminding you that you're allowed to stop" personality was adopted throughout the brand to make it feel more relatable.
Social media as another permission slip system. The brand can't be preachy about phones being the enemy. It contradicts the idea. Instead, social's role was to be the friend that sends you something to do. Adapting the permission slip idea for social made them repeatable, sharable, product-connected content. Every post on social media would be about inviting people to get off of social media, which sounds contradictory, but it forges a deep emotional connection between the brand and consumer, and reinforces that at every turn.
Distribution focused on grocery retail instead of online DTC. Another way afterhours reinforces the idea of fitting into your natural routine is by removing the typical friction DTC brands face — having content that makes customers trust them enough to make the leap and order the product a first time — and selling primarily in grocery stores. That fits into your existing routine instead of asking you to seek it out.
To make the social sharing aspect more visible, afterhours comes in a 4 pack, each one being a collection — either nostalgic or exploratory. That way, someone picking up afterhours for the first time would get to see 4 different prompts, and even share one with a friend.
The Outcome
afterhours became a system where every decision reinforces one idea: you're allowed to spend your free time intentionally. The permission slip, social content, flavor pairings — they all say the same thing. That consistency is what makes people believe it.
The ultimate idea isn't the soda - it's that when people are given permission to spend their time on something that actually belongs to them, they'll take it. And sometimes, that's just what we need.
