Bristol illustrator Alice Ferns brings the full journey of fruit from field to factory to table in a gift box designed to be its own wrapping.
The brief was deceptively simple and immediately compelling: create a gift box that does not need wrapping. For Alice Ferns, a Bristol-based illustrator, it opened up something much richer than a packaging project. It became an opportunity to tell a story.
Ferns was commissioned by Single Variety Co, a Bristol jam producer whose focus on single fruit varieties and quality produce gave the work its central thread. Rather than reaching for generic fruit imagery, Ferns went looking for the real thing. She studied the shapes and colours of the full range of fruit the company works with, got under the skin of the jam-making process and found herself genuinely captivated by what she discovered.
“I was so intrigued by photos inside the jam factory and learning about the jam making process and wanted to include imagery that captured that story in the illustration too,” she explains.
The result is a series of panels, one for each side of the box, that follow the journey of fruit from field to factory to customer, with a few nods to the company’s Bristol home woven in along the way.
The visual reference points are telling. Ferns looked to William Morris wallpaper as a starting point, and that influence is felt in the way the illustration handles repeat and density, building a surface that rewards time and attention. But this is not pastiche. The warmth of the colour, the approachability of the characters and the genuine delight in the subject matter are distinctly her own.
“I love the idea of hiding characters and scenes within the repeat pattern so the more you look, the more you notice,” she says…
and that layered generosity is exactly what lifts the work beyond decoration into something that earns its place as the gift itself.
The ambition of the project, a box that functions as its own wrapping, demanded that every surface carry weight. Ferns meets that challenge across all six panels, creating a cohesive world rather than a repeated motif. The packaging becomes an object worth keeping, which for a producer whose whole identity is built around care, quality and the provenance of individual ingredients feels exactly right.
Alice Ferns is an illustrator based in Bristol whose work focuses on joyful, approachable and uplifting illustration across themes of mental wellbeing, food, coffee, cycling, the outdoors and the experiences of women, girls and mothers.
ARTIST LINKS
aliceferns.com
The jam gift box is available at singlevariety.co.uk
Photography: Josh Campbell, jcampbellphotography.co.uk
