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.

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 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.

It’s vitally important to build in brand scalability when launching a start-up. The brand should be designed to allow for expansion.

A good example of this is the brand creation work that we did for a street food business called ‘Flette.

The work that we did allows for the brand to comfortably sit in a streetside gazebo at the same time as an upmarket restaurant location, or indeed a supermarket shelf, without feeling over-stretched or compromising its brand values.

The brand identity system that we designed allows for this scalability and covers signage, packaging, clothing, vehicles as well as online design.

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.

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