The Chia Co Chia Pots

We had to sculpt the initial shape and we did this with polystyrene because we knew that it would be an easy material to work with. We set a block of polystyrene on a turntable and spin it whilst shaping it, much like a lathe, to give a perfect pot shape.

From this, we made a mould and cast a fibreglass master. The master had to be very strong and take tons of pressure as we would be placing it in an industrial sized vacuum former to form clear plastic over the shape, resulting in clear plastic replicas of the pot. Before we could do this we had to sand and finish it to a highly polished surface, making sure to sand out all blemishes and undulations.

The lid was made in the exact same way, which also had to be vacuum formed in clear plastic. There is a spoon supplied on the underside of the lid of the original pots so we had to be true to this and make a giant version of the spoon. We sculpted this in clay and made a mould so that we could cast three of them to go with the three pots.

We had to find a way to make the clear pots look as though they were filled with the Chia product, but making the seeds would be too costly, and sourcing actual seeds wouldn’t work because of the large size of them scaled up, so we had to print an image of the seeds on to conformable vinyl which we could adhere to the inside to look like the real thing. Firstly we had to take a very high resolution image of the seeds and use our local printer to print on onto the vinyl. Luckily for us, we work closely with a number of local companies, and one of them is used to covering jumbo jets, cars and buses with conformable vinyl so our little pots were easy for them.