Truly Deeply/Madly

London’s aBuzz About ‘Unpack­aged’
Lon­don has long been one of the worlds great­est retail cities — a place where new con­cepts are launched and sunk every day with barely a rip­ple to mark their pass­ing. As they say in the clas­sics — ‘If you can make it there, you’ll make it any­where…’. Into this buzzing retail land­scape, old school food store ‘Unpack­aged’ was qui­etly launched four years ago as a mar­ket stall and over the ensu­ing years has grown to become a much loved and pow­er­ful lit­tle retail brand in a charm­ing shop at 42 Amwell Street, London.

Great Brands Are Spo­ken About
What began with lit­tle fan­fare has slowly but surely become a full sym­phony of brand rep­u­ta­tion as media and cus­tomers alike have gone ‘bonkers’ for the brand. Unpack­aged has been fea­tured on BBC Break­fast, BBC Lon­don News, Chan­nel 5 News, Cap­i­tal Radio, BBC Radio Lon­don, Radio 4’s PM pro­gram, Radio Roma­nia, CBS Week­end News, The Inde­pen­dent, The Guardian, The Observer, The Evening Stan­dard, Style Will Save Us, The Tele­graph Mag­a­zine, Time Out, The Daily Express, Design Week, Wallpaper.com, Metro, thelon­don­pa­per, The Isling­ton Gazette, The Isling­ton Tri­bune, Pack­ag­ing News, The Gro­cer, Which Mag­a­zine and lots of green blogs. Their vin­tage tea cup can­dles have been in Vogue and Cather­ine was voted num­ber 32 in the Observer Food Monthly Top 40 Eco Food Heroes.

Track­ing the Tide of Tra­di­tional Sen­ti­ment
By for­tune of tim­ing or stroke of strate­gic bril­liance, Unpack­aged has floated to suc­cess on a stream of tra­di­tional sen­ti­ment. In the global brand land­scape of the last two years, few trends have been seen as con­sis­tently or strongly as a return to embrac­ing old fash­ioned val­ues. Brands across the spec­trum that con­nect with our sense of a safer, calmer time when life seemed less com­pli­cated and more in our con­trol have ben­e­fited from a time of vast global uncertainty.

Step into the pic­ture Unpack­aged — a store that looks and feels like the cor­ner gro­cer of our col­lec­tive child­hood, a brand who’s val­ues reflect those of a more grounded mind­set and who’s very rea­son for being seems to bring a sense of calm and peace. In their own words; “We want to make it easy for our cus­tomers to do the right thing – the right thing for them­selves and for the environment.”

The Visual Lan­guage of Brand Design
From the sim­ple, tra­di­tional type design of the brand mark to hand-written black­board on the foot­path, every visual expres­sion of the Unpack­aged brand has been care­fully designed to tell the brand story. The store inte­rior, the the­ater of the retail space, even the unbranded pack­ag­ing and mer­chan­dise have been sen­si­tively stage man­aged by the brand design­ers. The qual­ity of the brand design and the care­ful atten­tion to design detail turn this tra­di­tional con­cept into a con­tem­po­rary retail brand expe­ri­ence com­plete with mul­ti­ple unique brand prop­er­ties avail­able to be lever­aged to the advan­tage of the business.

They say great brands are built on great prod­ucts — dif­fer­en­ti­ated offers that have a unique cus­tomer ben­e­fit ‘baked-in’. From con­cep­tion to the very last scrap of hand-lovingly designed exe­cu­tion, Unpack­aged is a remark­able exam­ple of this brand principle.

If you’d like to have a chat about how to bake great­ness into your brand, give us a call — together we can build some­thing as unique as it is successful.

David Ansett, Bran­da­men­tal­ist
If you’d like daily updates of our brand think­ing, you can fol­low me on Twit­ter here.
Brand Design.

Tags: Authentic, Brand Agency, Brand Design, Brand Experience, Brand Personality, Brand Strategy, Brand-Storytelling, Corporate Image, Graphic Design Melbourne, London-retail, Melbourne Brand Strategy, Retail, Retail Interior, retail-brand, retail-concept, retail-design, Unpackaged, Visual Language

This entry was posted on Monday, February 15th, 2010 at 7:00 am and is filed under Brand Agency, Brand Design, Brand Strategy, Brand Voice, Brand-Storytelling, Corporate Image, Creative, Experiences, Graphic Design Melbourne, Visual Language. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.