Brand creation: Brand Definition / Brand Positioning / Brand Identity / Brand Tone & Language /  Packaging Design /  Website Design.

A quick Google image search for ‘donuts’ will bring up lots of photos of circular products sprinkled in multi-coloured ‘hundreds and thousands’ icing. The abiding image being a bit like a bakery crossed with a children’s creche.

That was the scenario that faced us when were were approached in our capacity of brand and identity design consultants to the food and beverage sector to create the brand and graphic identity system for a donut start-up brand.

The clients were two Brazilian guys with a small budget to get the whole thing off the ground, but they knew that brand was going to be vitally important to the success of their business start-up.

They told us that they wanted to called it Doughnuty. Which is a good, descriptive name in itself, but one that by itself was hardly going to create the level of stand-out and differentiation that they’d need to ensure success in such a competitive marketplace.

Our view was that we can’t just do a brand with a generic name and a colour scheme from a children’s play school. That was our strategic starting point.

Our first key intervention therefore was to adopt a phonetic approach to the name. The thinking being that if we’re going to be called Doughnuty let’s shorten it to a phonetic acronym – DNT … Dough-nut-y. The second intervention was to ‘own’ a colour – thus bucking the sector trend and creating another element of potential brand differentiation.

The brand identity system that we created was then applied to packaging, point of sale, clothing and online elements such as website and social media posts.

The brand that we created for DNT enjoys massive popularity and a strong online following. Sales are good and the start-up is already looking at expanding.

Brand creation: Brand Naming / Brand Definition / Brand Positioning / Brand Tone & Language / Brand Identity: Logotype Wordmark, Graphic Icon, Definition Of Photo Image Style, Typography, Supporting Iconography + Formalisation Into Brand Style Guides.

Creating a powerful brand starts with the name. It’s perhaps the most demanding part of a brand creation project. That’s because anything that’s obvious is probably already being used by someone else. It was a lot easier 20 years ago.

This was the initial challenge when our client approached us – in our capacity as brand creation experts for start-ups in the food and beverage sector – to create their new olive oil brand. In fact they had another name in mind completely: Squeezy – because it was descriptive of its plastic bottle.

We felt that creating a brand around what was after all a generic packaging style, whilst perhaps useful in the short term – when this type of packaging is a novelty in relation to traditional glass bottles – would mean potentially limiting their differentiation in the long term. For example, the marketplace is already starting to adopt this type of packaging – indeed M&S has just brought out a really striking own range olive oil in a vibrant yellow green squeezy bottle.

No, we wanted to go for another naming route entirely. One that would give the new brand both real on-shelf stand-out and would also allude to its brand values.

Oilwell was the name that we came up with as part of our role as brand and identity creation consultants. Both descriptive and with a double meaning word play.

The logo design was kept simple – minimal and contemporary. This would allow the bottle to use simple striking typography rather than additional design elements – such as tertiary level patterns – in order to stand out.

The identity system that we developed was subsequently applied to outer packaging and online applications including website and social media.

Brand creation: Brand Naming / Brand Definition / Brand Positioning / Brand Tone & Language / Brand Identity: Logotype Wordmark, Graphic Icon, Definition Of Photo Image Style, Typography, Supporting Iconography + Formalisation Into Brand Style Guides.

Our client’s business had been importing and hand-blending specialist teas for over 25 years and supplying some of the country’s most well-known high street retailers such as Fortnum & Mason.

When they wanted to create their own tea brand start-up specifically aimed at the independent boutique hotel sector they came to us in our capacity as a brand identity creation consultancy specialising in the food and beverage sector.

They wanted the product to represent their exploration of the best leaves and their navigation of the long journey from plantation to pot. And that it should also nod to tea’s position as the sustenance of choice for weary travellers throughout the ages.

A strong brand should be rooted in an incisive idea that goes to the heart of its reason for being. This will then drive everything that the business does, not only from a marketing perspective but also from an operational one.

With that in mind we realized that the one common factor shared between its core target independent boutique hotels customers is that they are all likely to have a freestanding bath. Hence our coming up with the name for the brand – Tuhb. Apart from being a subversion of ‘tub’ it’s also an acronym of ‘Tea – Unique House Blends’.

This naming approach fits with a positioning of being a contemporary tea company rather than a traditional one. In effect we were travelling in the opposite direction from most tea companies, who tend to employ traditional and heritage based brand identity cues. Thus, the name lead to the development of the simple tub graphic icon.

At the other end of the challenge is that they offer multiple tea blends, often in small batches and with new ones being developed all the time. Our packaging design solution is therefore conceived to be flexible in order to allow them to do this – a branded generic pouch concept that is over-layed with colour-differentiated individual labels.

Brand Creation: Brand Definition / Brand Positioning / Brand Tone & Language / Brand Identity / Packaging Design + Formalisation Into Brand Style Guides.

Brand creation: Brand Definition / Brand Positioning / Brand Tone & Language / Brand Identity: Logotype Wordmark, Graphic Icon, Definition Of Photo Image Style, Typography, Supporting Iconography + Formalisation Into Brand Style Guides.