Award-winning designer and branding consultant Sam Smith looks at three retailers who have created a strong brand identity and continue leveraging the power of their branding through consistent application.
In August, we looked at the Fundamentals of Branding, and I discussed the importance of having a consistent look and feel. This helps customers instantly recognise you and builds customer loyalty, which results in sales. So, I want to look closely at this fundamental element of building a solid brand. A wishy-washy look and a bunch of mixed messages can be confusing, affecting your bottom line and business growth and hindering your ability to build trust with your ideal customer.
Here are three examples of retailers with excellent brand consistency.
1. Berylune
This fantastic gem of a store, Berylune, is an independent lifestyle shop in Royal Leamington Spa run by sisters Amy & Emily and their best friend, Zoë. The Berylune brand is bursting with creativity, always fun, always colourful, and always cheerful. It uses its primary brand colour, this golden Ochre shade, throughout its communications from the front door right the way through to its product photoshoots, using the colour in backgrounds and clever styling. It’s a powerful element of their brand and appears in most reels, videos, and imagery, even if it’s a subtle touch.
Using this muted tone and beautifully handwritten logo epitomises what’s in store when you go inside. They follow this handwritten style through to an illustration of their bricks and mortar store, which features on stickers for their online orders. They have rather cleverly highlighted their store with their brand colour and left the rest of the illustration black and white, so it’s easily recognisable and stands out. The window displays are always relevant, refreshing, and playful, and their behind-the-scenes videos make you smile. Berylune is a fabulous example of consistency through and through.
Idea: Review your customer touch points such as your social media, website, business cards, signage, carrier bags and online order paperwork, for example. How consistent are the fonts and brand colours you use? It’s worth noting that colour is a simple yet one of the most important assets you can use and it’s so easy to implement.
2. We are Pop
Established in 2019 by friends Carly and Sophie, We are Pop is based in Banbury. This store is pure fun. Its striking monochrome branding allows its products to pop in-store and online, instantly helping them showcase the best in design-led, hard-to-find toys, gifts, and books from the most exciting independent brands they champion. They use a great deal of white in-store, in photography and social media, giving We are Pop a robust and fresh visual identity. It combines black patterns and shapes to bring its brand to life.
Being a custodian of monochrome myself, I know only too well that using a minimal palette can be challenging, it can be so tempting to go off-piste and add colour, BUT it’s essential to stay on brand. I’m sure the designers and marketing department at IKEA are bored of blue and yellow, but when you see those two colours together, IKEA will always come to mind. Fans of my planner, I met Carly and Sophie at a Christmas Market. I can’t wait to visit their store very soon.
Idea: Evaluate your brand look and feel alongside what you sell, do the two complement each other? Do they speak to your customer the same way, giving them clarity into who you are, your values and the products you bring them?
3. Present and Correct
Present & Correct is a stationery and office supply store named after a well-known English phrase, often used in schools when a headcount occurs. And boy, their name comes to life in their photography and product displays. Their stand-out, flat-lay product photography and in-store displays embody order—a place for everything and everything in its place.
Present and Correct in Arlington Way, London, has a distinctive visual vocabulary. A very structured graphic look, mixing new with old, which unifies everything from packaging to products helping the brand generate a solid social media following. Their tone of voice is simplified and organised, too, which mirrors their distinctive look and feel. Their branding is so minimal, which beautifully echoes its product range: no fuss, no frills, just stationery heaven done so well.
Idea: Is the name of your business an authentic reflection of the products you sell? Does it stand out? Is it memorable? How consistent is your tone of voice, the language you use when you speak to customers, whether when speaking or the written word?
TRY THIS…
A quick and easy exercise to check your brand consistency is to put all your communications together, print them out or pop them on a Pinterest board so that you can see everything together. Your logo, photo of your signage, carrier bags, product photography, social media posts, tissue paper and in-store signage, for example. It’s fantastic that when you put the items side by side, what you see. You can often spot where you can improve your brand consistency.
Sam set up her design studio in 2009, and after years of helping businesses build successful brands, Sam took on the challenge of creating her own when she founded HELLO TIME in 2018. Not only the founder, but Sam is the creator of the award-winning HELLO TIME Planner. If you need help, Sam provides visual identity audits for small businesses, helping you evaluate and sanity-check your creative output for consistency and growth.
Contact Sam hello@hellotime.co.uk or DM her by clicking here.
