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Gracie's Brands
Creative Direction + Design
THE CLIENT
Gracie's Brands
THE SCOPE
• Brand Positioning
• Verbal Identity + Messaging
• Visual Identity Design
• Web Architecture + Design
• Packaging Design
• Supporting Collateral
The Challenge
Build a flexible and well-established foundation for a new brand built within an already established and popular, semi-national chain of high-end dog treat retail stores. This arm of the business would be exclusively for franchisees to sell in stores, and would need to communicate friendliness, quality, fun, and whimsy through visual storytelling and foundational verbal messaging. Though there was a request for zero visual ties to the parent organization, the spirit should shine through and uphold the ethos of the company. The identity system would need to allow for flexible evolution and initially include Gracie’s Barkery and Gracie’s Farms, which provide nutrient-rich sweet and savory snacks to your furry friends. Finally, the brand required activation with a web presence and and packaging designs that would make the brand experience seamless and consistent.
The solution: brand identity system
An approachable and friendly logo was designed to communicate the purpose and intention of the brand to the audience containing an image of the inspiration, Gracie herself, with a warm and welcoming typeface. The system needed to be flexible and adaptable to accommodate other sub-brands of the business like Gracie's Farms and Gracie's Barkery, with potential for additions in the future so we built several variations and stamps to use throughout marketing and packaging to help identify the brand and build recognition for Gracie's "gold standard."
The brand system also needed a color palette to establish the parent brand but provide supporting tones and shades that coordinated, but differentiated each sub-brand. A primary set was determined for Gracie's Brands, then secondary palettes of both warm and cool tones were established.
A supporting set of patterns and playful illustrations representing several breeds and happy wagging tails were provided to use in future marketing efforts, as well as icons for key identifiers in consumer packaging.
The solution: consumer packaging
Once the brand was solidly established, the first templates to be used consumer packaging were designed. Here the icons and color palette system came to life, helping to readily identify the parent brand with an ever present brown and yellow (and Gracie, of course) while sub-brand colors appear in large swatches to catch attention on shelves.
Consistent typography and logo usage help tie the entirely of the system together, with customized patterns giving each sub-brand a unique touch of their own. Editable templates for both pouch bags and container labels were provided complete with nutrition and regulatory info.
The solution: web design
Translation of the brand guidelines came directly into the construction of one main site to house Gracie's Brands with the overall purpose with brand and ingredient education. Built in SquareSpace, it then lead to two sub-sites featuring product-specific items for Farms and Barkery.
Web architecture was established with preliminary alignment of all content needed, then applied to a live template in the future. Secondary pages featured background about Gracie's Tale, her mission, a "gallery" of Gracie's friends to encourage engagement, production info, and an e-commerce shop.
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