Samuel Ross has reimagined water. It’s now black and costs £28

On 19 September, Humantra released Carbon Grape, an electrolyte powder that turns water almost black. It was developed with Samuel Ross and his studio SR_A, costs £28 for twenty sachets, and is sold as a limited edition called Carbon_1.
Twenty years ago this would have been a sneaker. Ten years ago, a hoodie. That it is now a zero-sugar drink mix shows where the collaboration economy has moved: away from what you wear and toward what you do to your body before nine in the morning.

Ross is a good guide to that move. He began as Virgil Abloh's first design assistant, founded A-COLD-WALL*, and in 2019 set up SR_A with Yi Ng as an industrial design studio. Its partners since include Nike, Apple, Hublot and Kohler, and Ross now holds a multi-year role as global creative director of the studio's collaboration with the fitness tracker Whoop. Electrolytes are the next stop on a line that was already drawn.

Humantra has used fashion's playbook from the start. Founded in Dubai by British entrepreneur Charlie Wright, it entered the UK in 2023 through a collaboration with the streetwear label Represent. In 2025 it took investment from JamJar, the fund set up by the founders of Innocent Drinks, and launched into more than 1,200 Boots stores. This is a mass-market product that took a page out of the streetwear playbook.

So what does a designer add to something you dissolve? Not much, and the project is honest about that in its own way. The one design lever (besides flavour) is colour: the black comes from vegetable carbon, which Humantra says is used for colour only, and the reference is the dark volcanic beaches of St Vincent in the Caribbean.

The real design work actually sits beside the product. SR_A made a set of decanters, vases and cups, hand-blown in South London. Their forms borrow from St Vincent's volcanic rock and from London buildings like the Shard, the Leadenhall Building and the National Theatre. The idea came about when Ross, already a daily customer, messaged Wright on Instagram and showed him the glassware he was drinking from.

That is the useful thing to notice. A supplement has no apparent form, so it cannot carry authorship; it can carry a logo and a colour. Ross's answer is to design the ritual around it and let the consumable act as the entry ticket. It is the diffusion-line model run backwards, with the cheap item as the headline and the crafted one as the footnote. Both sides insist this is more than a logo swap. Wright has described the project as "not two logos next to one another", and Yi Ng, SR_A's co-founder and CEO, says "the electrolyte category was ready to be reimagined". Whether a black drink and a brutalist tumbler reimagines the larger category is open for discussion.

But the glassware is a real proposition. It shows where designers of Ross's generation think the next decade of work is: the kitchen counter, the morning routine, the body as the site instead of the mannequin. Whether anyone needs daily electrolytes is another question, and not one a decanter answers.