How Psychedelics Got a High-End Wellness Rebrand in Amsterdam

Where else would the most beautiful psychedelics ad of last year have come from other than Amsterdam?

During the festive season, when the prices of plane tickets home were soaring, Zerotrillion Amsterdam joined hands with Dutch wellness brand, When Nature Calls (WNC), to offer some comfort to the city’s stranded immigrant population: if you can’t travel physically, how about taking another kind of trip?

The creative agency positioned the brands’ range of psilocybin truffles as a way to fly home in a more spiritual sense over the holidays. The various strains could figuratively transport consumers to a place of warmth and connection, without having to fork out a loan for the journey.

Challenging exaggerated, cartoonish, and potentially intimidating perceptions of psychedelics, this positioning placed them in the high-end wellness space, with a stunning design system to match. Vintage plane tickets inspired the packaging, while the OOH posters paired a stream of refined copy with organic, colourful splotches that recall land forms – handmade in the agency’s studio by blending watercolours and mushroom oil.

Each jar of truffles also came enclosed with a postcard guiding the ‘traveller’ on what they could expect during their trip, helping set intentions for what to think about before, during and after. This was all unboxed by several international Amsterdam-based influencers on their socials.

It was an intense, hands-on process of bringing this campaign to life, fuelled by creative ambition and sparked by a serendipitous encounter – as LBB’s Zara Naseer found out when she sat down with Zerotrillion Amsterdam creative director, Justin Mulcahy.

LBB> How did you first get involved in this project? What was the brief from WNC, and how did you initially respond?

Justin> So it was actually a proactive brief from our side. We were really keen to do something for expats in the city, because basically everyone in our office bar our head of finance is one. It was an idea that just popped into my head as I was just walking past the WNC store one day – it’s a really interesting space, like a wellness centre where they run classes, sell matcha, and all of that kind of stuff.

In the course of walking around the store, I noticed that they had a psychedelics range. I had a chat with the person that happened to be at the desk that day, and that person ended up being the right person to talk to about it. She was really receptive. 

It was an idea that we probably should have had in November, but it came in December, so we got our skates on and put together a presentation of exactly how we saw it coming to life. The art direction was quite fluid, so we had a bunch of different references, and we were all really excited about one particular route. Then it was just a scramble to get it all together and make it happen.

LBB> So quite a quick turnaround!

Justin> Yeah – from when we started working on it to when it came out, it was three weeks.

LBB> How did you work with WNC to change the perception of psychedelics through this campaign? Were there any specific stereotypes you were trying to get away from?

Justin> A lot of people's perception of psychedelics comes from what they see in films like ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’: that it's about completely losing your mind. Everything dripping from the walls around you and the like. But WNC wanted to position psychedelics in the high-end wellness space, so we wanted to infuse more of the calmness and the comfort, making it a lot less scary and more approachable. 

This was not something that we wanted to do that was in any way like a big joke. The product that we want to put out into the world isn't something for hedonists. This is something for people that want to do some internal exploration.

We showed this through a design system that references vintage plane tickets. That could very easily have been a big joke, with a big plane on the front or something, but we tried to make it super stripped back, super refined, so that they were just indications of the ticket and the pun of the trip, rather than it being silly. 

LBB> The design element is beautiful, blending psychedelic aesthetics with a feeling of comfort – talk us through the craft behind it. 

Justin> There was one particular reference that all of us were drawn to that was much more colourful. It didn’t have anything to do with psychedelics, but it made us think about mushrooms and journeys, so we had the idea of mixing mushroom oil with watercolours. That was something that we did in our studio during a day of experimentation – lots of dripping and sploshing and painting. 

Then we took those organic patterns, put them into Adobe and started fiddling around with them, changing the colours, refining, and adding the copy, which is what you see on the visuals for the jars and the postcards as well.

The postcards inform the intentions of the trip, so we crafted stamps that reference passport stamps, but also stamps you get on the back of vintage postcards. We put a lot of thought and care into everything that we did, with all the tiny details. Everything needed to make sense.

The story that lived behind the work was so important in the process. No one in a million years would ever know when they looked at it that we’d mixed mushroom oil and watercolours, but it felt like a really important part of the overall output.

 LBB> How did you complement these visuals with the accompanying copy?

Justin> What we noticed was that the patterns that looked the most interesting on the page started to look like land forms. That then fed into how I went about writing the copy, so ‘home’ is written like a destination within the watercolours themselves, and then the copy is dribbled around the sides, so that the whole thing feels like a journey and an experience to read.

For the tone of the copy as well, it was about adopting a much more calm, reassuring voice. We liked the idea of the copy being like a spiritual guide. So the first iterations were very much like your stereotypical shaman situation, but after living with it for a couple of days, it just didn’t feel at all right. It didn’t feel modern or calming – more like an advertising joke. 

Then we reverted back to somebody talking to you very calmly in a space like the wellness centre, mirroring the experience of taking one of their classes. Essentially, it’s trying to calm you down, give you a heads up of exactly what it was that you're about to experience, and setting intentions, which are what you want to achieve on your trip. A lot of people take drugs to get messed up, but in the purest sense, psychedelics are a tool to help you reach a place of understanding and calmness.

LBB> What was the most challenging aspect of bringing this campaign to life?

Justin> Time! There was no lack of passion from our side, but when making packaging for a product, there are all kinds of stages you have to factor in. So there were lots of late nights, weekend work, meetings, rewrites, all of that kind of stuff. Our office was just really, really excited, so we didn't mind putting in those extra hours to get it done.

Praise to the client as well, who would answer emails within an hour, and happily get on the phone whenever we needed to talk stuff through. It was a really collaborative process, and it had to be, because we didn't have time for it to not be. We had to keep that in mind and keep the vision extremely singular throughout.

There are few of those projects in your career that you know you won't see anything like again. And this one fell into that psychedelic category, which isn’t something I've seen any of my peers play in, in London or elsewhere. From my perspective as a copywriter too, it was a dream to have that subject matter to write about. A project of that ambition and with that tight a turnaround was a massive team effort, and we were super excited about how it all came out.