We want to thank all of you amazing people we have met during this project and all of you who have followed our little journey to Beijing. We hope you enjoyed this as much as we did.
Even though the design team leaves Beijing now, Wonderwater at Tian Hai is open until 3rd of October! Bye bye Beijing!
Our lovely crew says hello to the World! Missing ones in this pic are Matti and Jani.
The happy design team.
What made us super happy was that we got good feedback of the menu and the identity. We were told that the infographics were informative and user-friendly for chinese people. It was interesting to hear this because it was the first time for both of us we had made chinese layouts.
The water tasting was a success. We gathered together water from different areas of China - as well some international samples - and then people tried to guess where the water was from.
Our lovely water tasting boy and girl, Nobu and Feng Feng did very good job. They both spoke both chinese and english very well and got the water tasting to a different level, good job guys!
Beijing design week director visited the opening too.
Our brand new lanterns are shining in the sun, it’s going to be a perfect day for the opening!
Dazhalan Xijie, our street. It’s easy to spot where the wonderwater at Tian Hai is located.
Tian Hai’s very excited staff is getting ready for the day.
Some of our materials waiting to be sorted out.
Our little factory is working effortlessly together.
Tiina is showing the right places for water footprint stickers.
Tian Hai’s original menu and our water footprint stickers.
Filling the balloons was serious business. We had to do it in the next door bar and in the end we had filled the whole tiny bar with balloons.
Beijing Design Week is soon about to start, their flags are already here and our opening day is today (24th of September) at 4pm! We’re in a rush to get everything ready, but we are quite confident that everything is going to alright. Luckily we have a super crew helping us.
Tiina did a half day trip to Ikea to get stuff for opening day’s water tasting event.
We wanted to have Iittala stuff instead but because here is no Iittala shops around Ikea was the other option.
Bagging press packages at the Beijing Design Week’s office.
Martta from World Design Capital Helsinki 2012 is packing with Tiina the press bags with a professional touch.
Heaps of World Design Capital Helsinki 2012 and wonderwater at Tian Hai press bags!
YAY! Our flyers are done and looking good, too bad that you cannot touch the paper by yourself and sense the special feeling what the paper has.
Getting back to the hotel by a bus! We’re proud of ourselves!
Working late again, this time Iina is editing the wonderwater at Tian Hai video and getting to a right kind of working mood.
The street where one of our little factory shops is situated.
That’s the one!
Our wonderwater jewel made out to be fine!
100 metres of pendant and 250 little rings still need to be fixed with the jewel pieces.
Almost done with the sorting.
YAY first ready things, badges for waiters!
It comes dark really fast here, it always surprises us. We ended up to take a short cut to our hotel/ office through Forbidden city because some celebration and marching at the Tiananmen Square.
We found a cool place where you can do laser cutting and these are their samples. We got inspired and decided to do our own wonderwater jewellery for the staff, tomorrow we’ll know how well they came out. We have our fingers crossed!
Serious business, going through some samples for the badges.
We had some time to admire a beautiful sunset.
Nice dinner with lovely people. Notice that we found one more finnish member, Jani Joenniemi who has been huge help for this project.
It’s been a long day but still we have energy to dance on the streets!
On Sunday morning we took a taxi cross the city to the southern Beijing where are all the paper suppliers. We went through various materials and every time when we managed to find something what pleased us it was out of the stock.
For our luck the “Paper shop” had a massive storage and we finally managed to find right kind of paper and Iina became really excited about it.
We early birds arrived here yesterday morning. On the plain we couldn’t get any sleep even though we were quite exhausted and adding to that 5 hours time difference, working clock around, so it’s quite amazing how we pulled the long day through till the late night.
People have been here so nice and friendly to us and we have felt safe in this city. We are in good hands…we even have gas masks in our hotel rooms!
Tiina posing infront of our restaurant Tian Hai. It’s even better what we expected!
Mr. Jia Yong, our host always with the twinkle in his eye. The firs thing what he said to us was “Are you models?”. He immediately started to take funny pictures of us and laughed along… We drunk quite many cups of tea and shared a pomelo with him and then it was time to go and see our contractor somewhere far far away.
At the contractor’s place we had a little shock with our menu, the test prints didn’t look too great. Even Yijing (our lovely and beautiful coordinator in Beijing) was horrified. After long discussions and many litres of tea we finally had an agreement how we should proceed with all of the materials and only thing missing was the paper what we should use.
Our lovely restaurant Tian Hai or actually it is mr. Jia Yong’s, he kindly “lent” it to us. The Restaurant is in Dashila’r, Beijing and we lucky girls fly there this Friday.
