A researcher, a business trip and a thousand test batches.

Pocari Sweat is a non-carbonated soft drink made by Otsuka Pharmaceutical, the Japanese company better known for medicines. It went on sale in Japan in 1980: Japanese Wikipedia, citing the brand’s own history page, says a 245 ml can arrived in April 1980 and a powder for mixing a litre followed in June. CNN reported in 2020 that the drink was the idea of Rokuro Harima, an Otsuka researcher, and Japanese Wikipedia adds that Harima had earlier worked on the company’s Oronamin C Drink and that the thought came to him on a business trip to Mexico in 1973. According to a 1989 book on Otsuka’s hit products cited by Japanese Wikipedia, development began in earnest once Akihiko Otsuka became company president.

The company tells the rest of the story itself. Otsuka says its researchers aimed for a drink that anyone could enjoy in daily life rather than a sports drink, made more than 1,000 test products, and found that adding citrus juices took away a bitter note. Two final versions were tested, one sweeter than the other, and the company says one researcher carried both up a mountain to decide; the lighter one won. Otsuka also explains the name. “Sweat” was chosen to make the idea unmistakable, and “Pocari” is a made-up word picked for its light, bright sound; the company says it was meant to suggest a refreshing blue sky.

The launch was slow. Otsuka says many early customers did not understand the new drink, so its staff went to places where people were active and handed out samples — 30 million bottles by the end of the campaign — and that the drink finally became a hit in the summer of 1982. That same year, CNN reported, Pocari Sweat was exported for the first time, to Hong Kong and Taiwan, followed in 1983 by Singapore, Bahrain, Oman and Saudi Arabia. English Wikipedia says it is now sold across East and Southeast Asia and the Middle East, as well as in Australia, Mexico and the United States.

A Swiss typographer, a Japanese art director and a taboo colour.

The most design-minded fact about Pocari Sweat is who drew its name. Japanese Wikipedia credits the Latin-letter “POCARI SWEAT” wordmark to Helmut Schmid, the Austrian-born typographer trained in the Swiss tradition who spent much of his career in Japan. A 2013 lecture-and-exhibition notice from the Tokyo design school Toyo Bijutsu Gakko, cited on Schmid’s own Japanese Wikipedia page, lists Pocari Sweat among his logo and package work for Otsuka, alongside the company’s Energen and the Shiseido brands ELIXIR and IPSA.

A second designer shaped the pack. When Otsuka began advertising the drink in its second year, the art director Iwao Hosoya renewed the whole package into the form still used today, Japanese Wikipedia says, citing Hosoya’s own 1988 book Image no Tsubasa 2: Gan Hosoya Art Direction. The changes it lists are small but telling: the size of the wordmark, the spacing of its letters and the exact shade of the brand blue.

That blue was a risk. Otsuka says that in Japan at the time blue was considered taboo for beverage packaging, and that it was adopted anyway because the designer believed the pack should express the product’s essential qualities and the company president was determined that the design should carry the product concept. Japanese Wikipedia, citing the same Hosoya book, describes it as a marine blue that was considered bold for its day and says blue had been avoided on drinks packaging because it was thought to suggest no flavour. CNN reported in 2020 that Pocari Sweat has kept the same blue-and-white colour scheme since 1980. The drink was first sold in a 245 ml can and, CNN added, has been sold mainly in bottles since 1990; Japanese Wikipedia says lighter “eco bottles” were introduced for some products from around 2007. A lower-sugar sister drink, Pocari Sweat Ion Water, launched in April 2013 with a paler sky-blue label.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all drink and sweet names from Japan: Kirin, Suntory, Pocari Sweat, Mitsuya Cider, Fujiya, Kabaya and Yamazaki. Japanese drink and sweet brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s name to names that now belong to much larger food and drink groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a vending machine or convenience store to a supermarket shelf.

A drink or sweet brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a pack, a name and the drink, snack or treat it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its products are actually made and packed.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its products are made and how its packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Image girls, a painted airliner and a capsule for the Moon.

Pocari Sweat’s advertising has been as distinctive as its pack. Japanese Wikipedia says that from around 1981 Otsuka cast Western models and actresses in the drink’s television commercials, among them the British model Francesca MacBeth and, in 1983, Margaux Hemingway, filming outside Japan for the first time in the company’s history. In 1986 the first Pocari Sweat image-girl contest drew some 12,000 entrants and was won by the singer Chisato Moritaka, who then appeared in the commercials; later campaigns featured young actresses including Rie Miyazawa and Haruka Ayase, and the spots came to be seen as a launch pad for new stars. Their soundtracks were often hits in their own right, from ZARD and B’z to the Rolling Stones in 1990.

The brand has also gone looking for unusual media. In December 1997 an Airbus A300-600R of Japan Air System was painted with the “POCARI SWEAT” wordmark, the first airframe advertisement on a scheduled Japanese airliner, the Nihon Keizai Shimbun reported. In May 2014 Otsuka announced a project with the Japanese company Astroscale to send a “dream capsule,” shaped like a Pocari Sweat can, to the Moon, Tech in Asia reported. The capsule finally flew on Astrobotic’s Peregrine lander in January 2024, but the lander failed to reach the Moon and burned up on re-entry, The Guardian and ABC News reported. In 2019 the technical director of the anime film Your Name helped make an anime-style Pocari Sweat commercial, Anime News Network reported.

The brand remains in-house. Pocari Sweat is made and sold by Otsuka Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd., headquartered in Tokyo, which owns it as a registered trademark in Japan.

For a design guide, Pocari Sweat shows how a Swiss-trained typographer’s wordmark and one disputed colour decision can carry a drink for more than four decades. Compare Calpis, another Japanese soft drink with a long-lived blue-and-white look, and Yakult, the Japanese drink in a designer bottle. For this guide we use a deep Pocari blue, wave white and sky blue with a wide sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Pocari Sweat’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.