WAYSA — Organic Energy From the Amazon
challenge
Co-found an organic energy drink brand built around Guayusa — a plant cultivated by Indigenous Kichwa communities in the Amazon for generations. Connect their Farmers Association to the European market without compromising their values or traditions.
approach
Five months navigating EU law to secure certifications for importing Guayusa from Ecuador. Guided the Kichwa Farmers Association through the process of entering the global economy on their terms. The brand identity was built with Irving Ramo, an Ecuadorian artist deeply connected to symbolism — WAYSA as a rainforest goddess, positioning inspired by Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Every touchpoint — tone, photography, artwork — had to communicate at that level.
impact
Berlin's subculture drink until 2023. Gained traction in premium retail and hospitality. WAYSA opened the door to four months living with indigenous communities in the Amazon — the origin of everything that followed.
WAYSA started as a conversation between three friends — Martin Hussain, Paul Rieck, and me. We wanted to know what a better energy drink could look like: organic ingredients, clean energy, no artificial additives, and a real story behind it. The story was Guayusa — a plant the Indigenous Kichwa communities of the Amazon have cultivated as part of their spiritual and communal life for generations.
Getting Guayusa from the Amazon to the EU meant five months of navigating certification processes, legal hurdles, and import logistics. More importantly, it meant working directly with the Kichwa Farmers Association — guiding them into international trade without stripping out the values that made the product worth building. That balance mattered more than the timeline.
The brand identity was built with Irving Ramo, an Ecuadorian artist deeply connected to indigenous symbolism. The name and logo came from his vision. I took that and built the rest: communication tone, photographic language, positioning, artwork. The brief was that WAYSA is not just a drink — it's a rainforest goddess. Nothing could communicate below that.
WAYSA became Berlin's subculture drink — stocked in premium retail and hospitality, carried by people who understood what it stood for. The bottle below is from a shoot that captured exactly that world: the drink as object, artifact, talisman.
The journey was cut short by a partnership that didn't hold. But what WAYSA opened was more significant: it brought the three of us to the Amazon, to months living with Indigenous communities, and eventually led me toward Sympathya — the next chapter of that same thread.
