GUUD’s brand mission is to make it easy and attractive to find sustainable alternatives to everyday retail home and on-the-go items. Over the past few years this market has started to fill up, and for good reason. My challenge was to create a design language for the CPG brand that at-a-glance is authentic to its mission, has global appeal, and a classically modern look.
Aesthetics are the language of feeling, and in a society that’s information-rich and time-poor, people value feeling more than information.” — Marty Neumeier.
This quote by bestselling brand-and-design author Marty Neumeier effectively sums it up. People are more likely to value feelings over the information in our digital age. This works for and against you in the brand world.
The average bounce rate of a website is less than 15 seconds; that’s how long you have to capture people’s attention and convey your message, and even less on social media. If your website and brand don’t feel right, people are out. Although this brand is a digital-first one, I did not want to fixate solely on typical web branding exercises and definitions. I wanted to build this brand in the holistic sense ~meaning from signage, in-store/retail, experiential, video, online, and across ad channels.
The task.
Understanding the challenges and nuances of each channel, I created benchmarks for each medium and channel. For example, for the palette, I wanted to make sure the colors could translate into ADA-compliant button colors, translate to attractive and nuanced CMYK color blocks for signage, and also translate to nice RGB colors for video use. My efforts at a tactical level included logo design, brand color palette, font, logo, and font usage requirements across mediums/uses and photography but what I was striving for is discovering at a deeper level the brand ethos.
That continues to this day.
Their mission.
The GUUD Brand is a mission driven brand (LA) that offers sustainable products that pull the mainstream consumer away from plastic and unsustainable everyday products that clog our waterways and landfills. All products are carbon neutral, and include minimal packaging that is eco-friendly. A portion of their proceeds are donated to non-profit organizations committed to addressing the climate crisis through advocacy, education and action. Their product lines touch every aspect of home and on the go with pets, yoga, gifts and on the go products.
