When founders ask us for branding, they almost always ask for a logo. When we deliver branding that just nails the logo, the brand fails on shelf. The two facts are connected.
After eight years and several hundred product-brand identity projects, here's where the leverage actually lives — and where most projects waste it.
The logo is 5% of the work
A great logo is necessary but not sufficient. Buyers don't recognize brands by their logos at retail — they recognize them by color and shape. Coca-Cola is the red can. Method is the bottle silhouette. Lush is the matte black tub. Nail the recognition system, and the logo is just a confirmation cue.
Color is the real identity
Pick two anchor colors that the brand will own. They should be unique inside your category (not just nice colors), legible at a distance, and printable in standard CMYK without spot inks. Most product brands skip this step and end up with a palette that looks like every other brand on the shelf.
Type matters more than illustration
Custom illustration on packaging is expensive and rarely scales. Distinctive typography — a serif/sans pairing that's unmistakably yours — does scale, costs nothing per SKU, and reads at every size from a 5cm pouch to a 5m banner.
Voice is part of the visual brand
Tone of voice is usually treated as a brand-strategy add-on. It shouldn't be. The way the brand talks on the back of the pack changes how the front of the pack reads. We brief copy and design together — never sequentially — and the resulting brand feels coherent in a way most brands don't.
If you can't describe what your brand sounds like, your packaging is doing only half the work.
The brand book is for your team, not the design studio
A 200-page PDF brand bible is a vanity asset. A 12-page guide that your operations team can actually use to make decisions about new SKUs, social posts, and trade-show booths is worth more than the bible. Optimize for usability, not impressive page counts.
Going through a brand build (or rebuild)? This is one of our two core practices — happy to share a recent case study.