and unfortunately, I wasn’t very impressed. I went to the “Shop Small” pop-up shop shop located just east of the waterfront featuring local Seattle craft businesses sponsored by Amex and Delta Airlines. I felt that the presentations were underwhelming—very little merchandise was put out for display.  For whatever reason (maybe my years of experience in big box retail), sparce merchandise presentations don’t get me in the commercial mood. The take-away was that signage, branded collateral, and a wider and deeper merchandise assortment goes a long way towards setting the buying mood.

Built on the patented “Marma-grid,” our brand guide is really taking shape! Check out some of our sample pages. Visual merchandising standards to come.

So I haven’t posted in a while, but Kim and I have been busy. One of the things we’ve been working on is signage for our pop up shop. This is an 18″ long wooden sign we had laser cut. Getting excited to see our designs in physical form!

This week we also crafted Orange Marmalade’s brand statement and values. They are as follows:

Brand Statement: Our mission is to provide a fun experience and delightful gifts.

Brand Values:

• Provide customers with an unexpected experience.
• We are inspirational, not aspirational.
• We encourage individual creativty in our team.
• Fun drives our bottom-line.
• Clear and direct communication builds efficiency.

Here it is…logo is finalized!

This week I read the book Branding a Store by Ko Floor.

Here’s an exerpt that sums up the book’s thesis:

“Every strong brand identity is built on three pillars: a clear, differentiating positioning, a distinct personality and consistant communictions. The brand positioning is a mix of functional, tangible attributes that the retail brand has to offer to the consumer (the ‘what’). The brand personality describes the characteristics of the retail brand (the ‘who’) and is strongly emotional. The brand communication informs the consumer through its own look and feel (the ‘how’) of the positioning and the personality. But the way everything is communicated also has an influence on the brand identity. Together the positioning, the personality and the communication form the retail brand circle.”

This week we are finally working on the logo! We are pretty happy with the type, but are still working on the mark. Fun fact, any little motif we make that doesn’t make it to the logo could be used in the future in our signature prints!

This week we nailed down a lot of the look and feel of the brand. This style guide will help us both in the logo development and in defining the brand in the brand guide.

Tonight we met with Heather Grdinic to discuss brand guides and messages. Heather has had an extensive career in corporate retail including design positions at Target and Nordstrom. She emphasised that brand guides are crutial in defining the voice of a brand. She mentioned that defining the subtle nuances of what a brand is not is helpful as well. Lots of great info to help us build our brand guide. Thanks Heather!

This week we finalized our color pallette. We also fleshed out our store’s concept and merchandise assortment: a gift shop that has signature prints that are utilized both in the visual design of the store and in the merchanise. We are pretty excited to design these prints. Also, our shop has a name: Orange Marmalade. Here’s our Pinterest Inspiration Board.