The business was established by Bridget Hugo after selling her stake as one of the two founders of the Franco Manca pizza chain. It was doing ok, but not great and needed a brand boost.

The challenge was how do you take a small bakery and give it a presence that will get it on the radars of a highly sophisticated, highly brand literate and well catered for (pardon the pun!) customer in London’s Zone 2 & 3 urban villages?

What could the brand bring the customer that a Bread Ahead or an Ole & Steen couldn’t?

Well firstly we should say that BreadBread has a good product. So a good starting point. But it simply wasn’t cutting-through. Now there’s very few silver bullet solutions out there. It’s generally just a question of doing everything as well as it can possibly be done. And that’s exactly what we did.

What we wanted to do with the branding was to make a very real connection between the product and the customer. And to make that connection run through every aspect of BreadBread’s communications. We set out to create a visual narrative. A visual identity system that is rooted in the product itself.

Well, fundamentally, this product is all about the provenance of the flour and the physical efforts of the bakers who turn it into bread. So when you look at the logo, or indeed, the supporting typography system you see flour. A simple solution but one that goes to the core of a business.

We then took the brand identity that we created and designed all of BreadBread’s supportingcollateral – from vehicles to packaging, clothing to signage, documents through to online.

The result is that its unprompted awareness with its London village target customer has jumped dramatically and sales are up. Dramatically so.

Also Interior Design, Furniture Design, Lighting Design.

The client wanted to utilize the benefits of a central bakery and create the platform to roll-out multiple outlets around London’s Zone 2 & 3 – it’s affluent London villages outside of the West End: Marylebone, Primrose Hill, Hampstead, Barnes etc. In other words where people actually live. The target audience was therefore very brand literate and sophisticated in their likes. They’re also quite open minded to the next new thing. That is, as long as it is authentic. The London foodie sector can spot a fake a mile off.

You have one opportunity to make a big impression and equally one chance to screw it up if you don’t deliver. In other words it’s not enough to simply come up with a nice brand concept – you actually have to deliver in terms of the product and the service. If these elements aren’t all equally strong then a brand will not survive in such a competitive arena.

We started our brand with a white sheet of paper.

The first thing that we created was the brand name. We wanted to articulate a contemporary feel through the brand that would reflect the bakery’s approach to its products: traditional values but meeting the wants of a sophisticated London customer with contemporary tastes.

B/alt. simply means Bakery Alternative. Which is exactly what we were setting out to achieve. We wanted to be different to run of the mill high street bakeries and embrace some of the vibe from the hip independent bakeries that have sprung up successfully around London over the last decade. In other words, a combination of the two. We had to keep an eye on the brief that this is a brand that was created to roll-out. We wanted the positive associations that come with a brand – such as consistency and trust – but we wanted the vibrancy and appeal of an edgy smaller ‘guerilla’ bakery.

This thinking manifests through the logo design – very simple and contemporary – through the supporting identity system. The supporting typography is vitally important in ensuring the consistency of the brand across all collateral from packaging through to the design of the physical space. Not to mention how ther brand works online to reinforce the feeling of the physical space.

What we were aiming for was one consistent brand proposition articulated through the brand identity system that can pace up or down depending upon the requirements of the collateral. Whether that’s the interior design, the bags carrying your to go croissant or the Instagram feed that you look at as you drink your coffee.

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.