The Story Behind UKHTA Seedbank Packaging.

Hey everyone. I’m the founder of the UKHTA seedbank and people know me under the nickname mr.Gram.

The story of how we created our packaging (not the genetics) goes back to 2012, when I quit my work as an author for Comedy Club and KVN and started to take strain breeding seriously.
I’d been doing breeding before that as well, but in 2012 the idea of launching my own seedbank was born.

That’s exactly when the concept of seed packaging with the J.A.W.S. 1.0 (Just Add Water System) germination system came to life.

The first version of this packaging was made for my first seedbank – Russian Genetics.

Back then, the packaging looked like an open jaw/mouth, which fit the name of the system perfectly – JAWS.

Before KVN and Comedy Club I worked in an advertising workshop, where I made shop signs and similar promo stuff, so I already had the technical skills to work with packaging design and so on.

For Russian Genetics I decided the best way to germinate was using a Petri dish placed inside a plastic blister.
All you had to do was add 3–5 ml of water into the package and the seeds would start germinating.

At that time I was making the packaging with my friend in a garage. We bought a machine and cut out all the blanks for the packaging completely by hand. Because of that some parts were slightly different and would only fit one particular blank. If you mixed them up, the package would come out crooked. So even storing the packaging was a challenge.

After I moved from Russia to Spain, I launched a new seedbank – UKHTA – where I completely changed the approach to the germination system.

Same as the first time, I cut the first blanks myself. This time I didn’t have any machinery, so I was sawing all the parts out with a regular metal hacksaw. And I was sketching the design with markers. )

But this packaging was already intended for large-scale production on expensive CNC machines.

That’s when the new J.A.W.S. 2.0 germination system appeared.
It no longer looked like “jaws”, in the sense that the top and bottom of the package were no longer connected by a single blister. This time we decided to mount the lid using built‑in magnets.

We ditched the Petri dish and instead turned the packaging itself into a built‑in germination reservoir. (The Petri dish would often fall out of the pack and we didn’t like that.)
We kept the simple germination method the same! Just add 5 ml of water into the pack and the seeds will start to germinate.

The outer look of the packaging is how people get to know UKHTA.

Since seeds themselves don’t look very presentable because of their tiny size, the packaging is the face of the company and shows how meticulous we are with every detail, not just with the genetics.

1 g of seeds (around 50 seeds) costs about 400–500 €, while 1 g of gold gives you 100–115 €.

I never understood why seeds from most seedbanks are so expensive, yet they’re packed for pennies. Most often it’s just a printed cardboard with a design and an Eppendorf vial with seeds hot‑glued on.

“By the way, did you know that this type of seed container is called an Eppendorf?”

I decided our packaging should match the value of the product, so we added a strain passport and pot stickers for each individual seed. And on top of that we include our branded gift sticker with the strain artwork.

The strain passport is a short profile of the strain that growers usually need, so we were the first to implement a strain passport inside seed packaging.

I also made the first strain passport myself from whatever materials I had at hand.
It looked a bit cringe, but now it’s an exhibit in the UKHTA Seedbank museum.

Packaging design.

From day one we’ve treated the graphic design of our strains with special care and outsourced the development of characters, stickers and passport designs to the top design company in our industry – Premium Design (New York).

They created the characters for Bad Guy, Fruit Gum, 50 Dragons, mr.Orange and Candy House.

Later we found our own in‑house artist/designer, because the amount of work grew a lot.
Finding a good artist who can actually execute our vision is a serious problem! We’d been looking for one for about 3 years, but in the end we found a person who’s able to handle our tasks.

Future innovations in packaging.

We’re constantly looking for ways to improve our seed packaging, and very soon we’ll launch seed packs with a terpene test strip of the strain’s aroma.
This is a special piece of cardboard usually used for sampling perfume, but in our case we fix the strain’s terpene profile onto that strip.
This is completely legal in all countries, since terpenes are present in all plants and are not banned anywhere.

Such a test strip will let you experience the strain’s aroma right after buying the seeds.

In the future we plan to publish aromatic catalogues of our strains. This will let each grower pick strains by aroma and flavour profile according to their personal preferences.

We’re already ready to announce the terpene tester strips, but a few more of our new developments are still marked “Top Secret”.

We’ll keep refining our packaging non‑stop! We’re all waiting for J.A.W.S. 3.0, but that’s a huge project and it’s going to take time.

By the way, J.A.W.S. 3.0 will be connected with our AI agronomist‑expert – Scrog.io.
How do you think it’ll work? – drop your version in the comments.

Respectfully,
mr.Gram