How a Collectible Art Toy Brand Brewed Up Their Own signature Bubble Tea Drinks.
At Channel COSU, we love creative collaborations, but never did we imagine launching our own bubble tea drink, let alone TWO.
From November 29, 2024, to January 31, 2025, we had the incredible opportunity to collaborate with Tea Station, one of our favorite local bubble tea spots, to bring two signature drinks to life. What started as a fun idea turned into a real cool experience that we got to share with our community.
Extra special thanks to those who tried our drinks during our take-over! 🚀
Our character, Napa, is an alien who is obsessed with watching human content (just like all of us doom-scrollers on social media) and he has the ability to switch through different channels. When you buy a COSU art toy and bring Napa into your home, it's like he's now exploring your channel, watching you.
When conceptualizing the design process, we wanted to introduce our character Napa to the community by having him "travelling" to the Tea Station. Each window pane has Napa drawn in a different art style. Since Napa is tuning into Channel: Tea Station, we wanted to play on the transit theme visuals to help with the immersion. However, once you get inside the shop, the new concept was simple:
Napa has crash landed into the tea station and has blessed us with his SWEET TREATS!
Partnering with Tea Station, located at the midland and finch plaza in Scarborough, we launched two exclusive flavors: Satellite, a refreshing winter melon lemon tea with agar bubbles, and Plasma, a vibrant dragon fruit lychee green tea with lychee coconut jelly.
Each drink came in a custom branded Napa's Sweet Treats cup. During certain weeks of our take-over, we had special promotional freebies like our custom cup holders!
The inspiration for these flavors came from a mix of our personal tastebuds along with the rigorous taste tasting process that we did with the Tea Station team. Not only did their team help us create the most delicious recipes, but we had also given away hundreds of bubble tea samples out to our exhibit visitors during our first solo exhibition, Behind The Screen: A COSU Experience. The feedback we've gotten was able to make the drinks ever better!
This collaboration was more than just a new menu item. It was a celebration of creativity and community partnerships. We are thankful for local businesses who embrace supporting artists and creative entrepreneurs. We collaborated with Tea Station to create limited edition acrylic tickets, meant for their own collectors, and we loved to see collectors begin their COSU collecting journey through another form of product first.
Aside from our toys, did you know that some of our collectors started their COSU collection through our mystery pins first?
This was such a fun project to work on with Tea Station, and we want to thank everyone for coming out and trying out our flavours! It was because of the community that we turned this 1 week takeover into two full months!
Until next time,
Jackie & Tommy