Tea Company Cups and Saucers
From Mystic Tea Room
Throughout the 20th century advertising cups and saucers were issues by many makers of coffee and tea. For the first half of the century these were usually straightforward promotions, sometimes only available to distributors or retailers, and sometimes also offered to the public as premiums. Beginning with the nostalgia boom of the 1970s, reproductions of old labels for tea, coffee, soda pop, soup, and even obscure brands of dentifrice and baking powder began to appear on mugs, plates, trays, and tins. Most of these were produced by existing companies or licensed by those companies to manufacturers of china, glass, and metal wares.
The popularity of these nostalgic labels waned a bit during the 1990s and 2000s, but when the revolution in digital technology enabled the manufacture of very clean reproductions of old graphic art in short-run quantities, the makers of china, glass, metal, and plastic wares searched for — and found -- graphic label art from defunct companies, for which no licensing fees needed to be paid, and a glorious new age of reproduction label art appeared. At this point in time, it seems to me, as a graphic designer, that tea label nostalgia will be with us for quite some time to come.
Fortune Telling Tea Cups from Tea Companies
Companies that trade in packaged tea have occasionally offered fortune telling tea cups as premiums with the purchase of their tea or have issued instructional booklets about tea leaf reading which were included in packages of tea. Lyons, the big player in the exterior signage "tea wars," did not indulge in metaphysics, but Lipton's, Red Rose, and others produced marked divination cups for readers or sold their marked cups with "tea included."
