Today we proudly unveil our new brand identity design for Inspired Gift Cards.
A new Australian online retailer, Inspired Gift Cards provides an innovative solution to the gift-giving headache, and is just in time for Christmas!

Inspired Gift Cards provides a wide selection of gift vouchers from leading retailers, top restaurants, premium brands and unique experience providers. The gift can then be personalized, wrapped and delivered. However, the real beauty of this service is the inspired gift card that enables the receiver to choose their own gift from the exact retailer, service or experience they want.

Truly Deeply developed the brand strategy, name, identity, packaging and web design.

The brand proposition of ‘gifting magical moments’ focuses the brand on connecting the giver and receiver, and aims to make the whole experience of gifting special and memorable.

“The brand design is all about connecting and engaging with a broad range of customers as well as the recipients of the gift cards. A big part of the design challenge was to wrap what is essentially a functional product in a visual identity that captures the excitement of giving as well as receiving”, says David Ansett, Founder of Truly Deeply.

“Truly Deeply was instrumental in the development of our brand, values, personality and proposition and created a visual language that really appeals to our audience. It is clearly differentiated, more sophisticated than our competitors and everyone comments on how much they love the design”, says Sue Jackson, Executive Chairman, Inspired Gift Cards.

The website went live this week and already has more than sixty brands to choose from including Apple, Myer, Westfield, Harvey Norman, Bunnings, JB Hifi, Smiggle, Pandora, Red Balloon and Rydges Hotels – with many more to join the fold soon. You can search by brand, occasion and category or give an inspired gift card and let the receiver choose.

To see the website, Click here.

The Litmus group is a market leading niche international management consulting company who needed to rephrase their brand to better fit their highly differentiated approach business proposition.

Our first task was brand strategy – to provide real clarity around the strategic intent of the new brand, what it needed to accomplish and communicate to drive a better understanding of the Litmus brand proposition in the marketplace. Work-shopping with the client we developed a sharpened brand essence, values and personality for the brand to leverage.

Having achieved a strategy direction developed around the brand essence “A Specialist Force in Unlocking Strategic Value” we launched into developing a new brand identity loaded with visual cues to help deliver this new positioning through their market facing communications. Utilising our brand decode process we established where the brand identity should be positioned relative to its competitors. The brand identity design strategy demanded the new mark should have the heritage and gravitas of a traditional blue chip consulting firm, but with a dynamic twist that gives it a current feel and unique energy.

To achieve these goals we developed a traditional word mark that uses ligatures and combined letters to give the identity an established yet modern feel. To further enliven the identity a colourful interpretation of litmus paper was created to be used as key part of the identities visual language. Used as a background, to create a silhouette as just as a dash of colour it underpins the company as an agent of change. The combination of visual elements provides a set of strategically targeted visual communication cues for the Litmus Group to leverage, as well as a palette of unique visual elements to own in the market.

If you have brand envy, why not give us a call to discuss how we can re-position your brand for greater success.

A Beautifully Executed Re-branding Project.
We were engaged with Jean Hailes to conduct a full brand re-design, starting with the strategic framework and outputting all brand identity collateral. In a little under two decades Jean Hailes has developed a significant standing in the women’s health sector. But it also understands that it needs to continue to proactively develop the direction of the Jean Hailes brand. A direction that would further solidify Jean Hailes as the authority in women’s health to deliver cutting edge research and medical services for their clients. The result – a beautifully designed re-brand for this not-for profit in women’s health.

The Jean Hailes Foundation is a not for profit organisation devoted to improving the health and wellbeing of women. Founded in 1992, The Jean Hailes Foundation reflects the enduring legacy that Dr Jean Hailes made to women’s health. She was a pioneer in women’s health in Australia and in 1971 established the first clinic dedicated to women’s health. Dr Jean Hailes had an absolute passion for improving the health and well being of all women. Her expertise and determination to make a difference not only shaped hugely positive outcomes during her lifetime, it also inspired the creation of The Jean Hailes Foundation, following her passing in 1988.

Though developing a focus on networking and research we looked at the defining factors that could place Jean Hailes to enable them to deliver the best service and resources to their clients. To achieve this they need to become the definitive organisation on women’s health in order to have influence on national health policy and the authority voice in women’s health issues.

Leveraging the new go-to market brand essence, we set about creating a visual language that would represent Jean Hailes Essence and the myriad of other strategic inputs. The new brand essence called for a visual language that could tie together a re-focused scientific commitment, but also represent the common bonds that women face in their health lives. The illustrated ‘ networked woman’ was developed to represent the every woman and was surrounded by a visual language that combined a sense of femininity and scientific focus. In designing the complete brand identity for Jean Hailes we have developed a suite of elements including, corporate stationary, internal and external signage, website, marketing collateral and e-branding.

One of the advantages of being a full service brand agency is that it allows us to realise an integrated approach to the visual representation of the strategic framework. Jean Hailes was one of these projects that allowed us to execute the strategic and visual opportunities. The new Jean Hailes brand will serve the ambitions of the Jean Hailes organisation.

Place brand development, identity, naming, campaign design and execution.

This week, Truly Deeply proudly launched the new brand and campaign for Atherstone, a new community in Melbourne’s west. Working closely with the Lend Lease development team we defined the brand strategy, created a new name, designed the identity, and executed the entire launch campaign. The result is a distinct brand that creates an aspirational and compelling connection with the target audience and is already achieving outstanding results for the client.

The creative was driven by the brand essence ‘a haven to prosper’. The brand needed to stand out in the market and be truly memorable. The brand icon is a visual representation of a safe haven, emphasising the natural buffer to the surrounding area – one of the significant features of the location. A handcrafted logo-type adds further distinction from the competitive set and a softness that appeals to the audience. The natural imagery is extended into a visual language to create a brand that with an attractive unassuming style.

The brand identity and visual language takes its cues from the environment illustrating a lifestyle that is both aspirational and attainable. Graphically, the identity reflects the landscape of creeks, wetlands and parklands.” Derek Carroll, Director of Design, Truly Deeply

The campaign is wrapped around the communication proposition of “The Good Life”; a compelling brand story of an aspirational place to live in Melbourne, that is still within reach. This was then extended throughout all touch points into key messages to highlight the brand’s proof points or advantages.

For more information about Atherstone, visit atherstone.com.au 

The Cradle is a best of breed, 5 star luxury hospital dedicated to mothers giving birth. As a specialist maternity hospital The Cradle automatically carries strong clinical associations, there-for the role of the visual identity as to clearly differentiate The Cradle as the premium, 5 star hospitality brand within its marketplace. The visual language from brandmark to photographic style, from design layout and grids to production techniques is informed by the brand identity visual cues of premium hotels and health spas. These rich visual cues are aimed at connecting with the premium ‘parents-to-be’ market who wish to have access to the highest possible standard of clinical care, be pampered in luxury during birth recovery, and are happy and willing to pay a price premium for that.

As a brand, The Cradle is unique. It is a brand that embraces the joys of pregnancy and celebrates the wonder of childbirth. It also recognises the vulnerability of patients, their fear of the unknown, and their need for reassurance. The task of the brand communication for Cradle was to signal something fresh to the market, to reinforce the premium hospitality positioning and at the same time create immediate trust and belief, with a nuturing, personal feel.

The Cradle brand mark reflects the visual cues and aesthetics of the premium hospitality market, whilst the type face is both elegant and clinical and confident. The circular shape of the mark provides a sense of nurturing, with the space inside the ‘C’ reflecting a sense of the womb. The flowering gum leaves and branches hark back to the timeless nursery rhyme ‘rock-a-by baby in the tree tops’. The secondary visual language, colour palette and photographic style are all crafted to reflect the feel of a premium, boutique hospitality experience.  The new identity was implemented across stationery, signage, brochure and marketing collateral, advertising templates, brand voice and website.

“The vision of the Cradle and how we wanted it to be became part of us. The problem was how to communicate it to the world. My words and presentations only go so far. Truly Deeply created the words and the visual images to spread the message to the world. When my voice trembled with emotion as I read aloud the words they had created, I knew the message was right. The consistency  of words and visual language has been crucial in conveying our message to a new audience.”

Anthony Weeks
Director of Cradle Maternity Services

Spudbar was founded in Melbourne in 2000, born out of a frustration at the lack of a healthy, great tasting, healthy feed that was quick, convenient and value for money. It has been on a mission from day one, to create a new category of food offer that fuses natural goodness and big flavours into the nutrient rich gem that is the steaming baked spud. The potential of the brand was clear, the question was how to realise that great potential by taking the Spudbar brand to the next level.

When we began working with Spudbar they had 9 stores around Australia and was struggling to own a space in the market compelling enough to grow the business to the next level.

We were engaged to give Spudbar a complete brand overhaul. We conducted a brand audit to look at the Spudbar brand from the inside out and a comprehensive competition and market review to look at the brand from the outside in. The more we immersed ourselves in the brand the more it became apparent that Spudbar could greatly benefit from a new direction. A direction that was truly grounded in the humble potato, and more deeply connected with a market need.

What Spudbar needed most was a reason for being and that had to come from the brand up. To achieve this we immersed ourselves in their market segment, generated some clear qualitative market insights from customers, ex-customers and non-customers, and led a brand strategy re-think to provide a clear vision for where the brand and its offer could most potently be positioned for success in the market.

We developed the Spudbar brand charter, a roadmap defining how the brand needed to act, feel, speak and look to deliver a 360 degree experience that delivered on the newly defined brand proposition. We defined the drivers for the brand strategy as Natural Goodness, Surprisingly Delicious, Local Groove, Sassy and Easy. And we identified Spudbar’s brand personality as Real, Lively, Imaginative, Passionate and Engaging. These values and personality attributes were the driving force behind building the new look and feel. Spudbar’s brand image had to richly and evocatively reflect the brand’s proposition of local, authentic and a purveyor of potato heritage.

The key to developing the Spudbar brand identity was unlocking the cues of the visual language of one-off local cafes. Whilst these cafes seem disparate and highly individual, when explored as a group there are many similarities in the way they present themselves to market, often driven by a limited budget. The lack of polished design is a part of what identifies and differentiates these local, one-off cafes and restaurants. An example is their menus, which are often hand written on blackboards, or tiles or paper stuck to the wall, they rarely include photographs of the food. By unlocking the code of visual language for these high-loyalty, non-franchise food businesses, we developed the Spudbar brand identity to work in a similar, non-cookie cutter manner.

The brand identity design solution included two defining elements that work together to drive the brand experience from a visual perspective. The first is to identify each Spudbar by its location, we changed the organisational mind-set from owning multiple stores, to having local unique store in multiple locations. The stores changed from being called ‘Spudbar’, to ‘Richmond Spudbar’ or ‘Hawthorn Spudbar’, with a new emphasis on the local identifier. The second defining element was the integration of local street art into the store environment. The brand identity system we developed integrated the art work of a well known and very talented Melbourne paste-up artist. For each store a signature piece of art is created, that piece is ‘pasted’ to a prominent wall in-store and becomes a feature of the experience. The greater brand identity also incorporates a suite of ‘spud inspired’ illustrations from the same artist.

The most defining visual elements of the brands identity are hand-made from the lino-print Spudbar brandmarks, the store signage and interiors, the clipboard menus and a handcrafted typeface, reflecting the D.I.Y nature of local cafes.

In designing the complete brand experience for Spudbar we have developed a suite of elements including, corporate stationary, takeaway packaging, in-store and take home menus, uniforms, internal and external signage, website, marketing collateral, in-store environments, furniture selection, Art Direction of artwork and photography and typography.

“The brand definition work and brand identity design Truly Deeply developed for our Spudbar chain of healthy food stores has blown the lid on the potential for our business. We believe what was previously a nine store franchise now has the market positioning, store design and brand image to expand into a significant national network. As a return on business investment I can’t rate the brand work Truly Deeply produce more highly.”

Ant Morrel
Spudbar Owner & National Director of Marketing & Sales

Spudbar recently opened their first two branded and re-designed stores in Richmond and Hawthorn two inner suburbs of Melbourne and the results is a ‘dialled-up’ brand experience on all levels. Spudbar has created a space that is inviting and comfortable, a place for locals and a place that is uniquely on-brand.

The strength and longterm equity of the Spudbar brand will be driven by the solid strategic framework that has been developed. The strategic framework provides the backbone for the majority of decisions the business will make day-to-day.

Strategy is often seen as a separate discipline to design. For the past 10 years we have focused on the integration of strategy and design to deliver highly unique and effective brand experiences. Spudbar demonstrates how these brand disciplines interweave to create a rich brand experience with layers of meaning and personality, that connect with the market in a powerful way.

Since the launch sales have increased by 20% in month on month, store on store comparison and continue to grow.

We would urge you to go down to the Richmond Spudbar on Swan St or the Hawthorn Spudbar on Glenferrie Rd and soak up the atmosphere.

If you would like to know more about how combining brand strategy and design can take your brand to a new level, give us a call and organise a lunch date at one of the Spudbar store, because the proof is in the Spuds.

With such a diverse range of stakeholders, the developers of regional brands need to adopt a strategic and pragmatic approach. For a start there needs to be recognition that not all stakeholders will be of equal value in building a world famous regional brand, that the 80:20 rule is well and truly alive. Certainly the team we worked with on the Eyre Peninsula in South Australia understood this point. Led by the regional Development Board, the regional branding process started with identifying those businesses that were considered mission critical to being on-board. Clearly your preference is to have everyone on board, but it can also be a very liberating feeling if instead you identify the 20% of stakeholders who will give you 80% of the bang, you can then immediately narrow your focus. And of course the law of attraction always works, enlist the shakers and movers and others will want to jump on board anyway. Once you have the right people involved there is a need to explore what makes up the region, what makes it a special place. Is it nature’s gifts, is it food producers, is it the unique experiences on offer, is it wine, is it a combination.

When we worked with the Eyre Peninsula there was no shortage of platforms that we could create a brand around, but we know that brands that wish to be a little of everything will eventually amount to a lot of nothing. We steered some deep and meaningful conversations and we landed on a very powerful proposition. Eyre Peninsula has seafood to kill for and it has a rugged pristine environment producing it. They could ‘own’ seafood and they could leverage the rich storytelling that their entrepreneurial and adventurous fishermen live and breathe everyday. But there was also a lot of other food related businesses that were not seafood centric. Grain and lamb producers, olive growers, wineries and much more, all great examples of excellent produce, but not unique to many other regions in Australia. They did not provide a strong enough point of differentiation.

What was required was a regional brand positioning expression that claimed ownership of seafood and at the same time provided a positive halo effect over the other food and tourism enterprises of the region. The solution came in the form of the following positioning line.’Australia’s Seafood Frontier’. By making it Australia’s Seafood Frontier the Eyre Peninsula claimed ownership of seafood in Australia and at the same time the word Frontier conjured up a feeling of wild, untamed and pristine
- all very positive attributes for the other food and tourism businesses in the region.

We then created a brand book (see example below) that articulated the regional brand values that
those responsible for delivering an on-brand experience, day-in and day-out, would have to live.
The brand values, essence and supporting narrative become a critical rallying point for aligning all
key stakeholders.

If you get the chance visit the Eyre Peninsula and experience Australia’s Seafood Frontier first
hand, you will not only have an amazing time, but you will get to fully appreciate the power of creating
a regional brand around something you can own!

We’ve recently been working with Australia’s leading specialist Gen Y recruitment brand. We provided GXY Search absolute clarity around their market proposition and layers of brand definition to allow them to align and focus their brand and business activities. As it often does, this new-found clarity of the brand led to a brief to update the GXY brand identity.

From sport to fashion, lifestyle to advertising GXY’s clients all boast ‘excitement jobs’ – the type of jobs many Gen Yers dream about. One of the defining attributes of Gen Y is they see themselves as distinct individuals who belong to a range of overlapping tribes. GXY genuinely has a right to lead those tribes as it is authentically Gen Y itself, from the way it thinks to how it behaves and where it parties, GXY is Gen Y through and through. The brand identity we designed for GXY was a reflection of their own status within the Gen Y tribes they belong to. The brand identity concept was developed through our creative brand design process. The brand identity developed was applied to business stationery, interior design and website.

Febfast asks Australians to take a month off alcohol and fund raise to help reduce the impacts of alcohol and other drugs on young people. We worked with the Febfast board to define their go-to market proposition and how they could attract more supporters to raise more money for their beneficiary organisations.

When we began working with Febfast they had aspirations for continued market growth but had a brand image that was in much need of a refresh. One of our main objectives was to take the Febfast brand from being a well-meaning, grass roots organisation and transform it into a serious, noteworthy organisation that successfully promotes well-being and personal growth while making a real difference in the lives of those effected by alcohol.

We were engaged to give Febfast clarity around their future direction and lead the brand visual identity re-design to create a fresh, new look for Febfast that would create a sense of community to become a market leader in the alcohol fasting space. Febfast is competing with a growing number of other other fasting fund raising events and needed a notable point of difference to their competitors. We defined the guiding thought driving the Febfast brand as ‘creating a space for change’. The thought of ‘Creating space for change’ allowed Febfast to create a sense of community and allowed participants to share a sense of comradeship and identity with other fasters. While the visual language represents the idea of self improvement – that by drinking less you can make more of life – it was backed by the irresistible urge to support those who need a hand to find their own potential.

With the new brand, this years Febfast has been the biggest yet, we would like to say a massive thank you to all the participants and the team at Febfast.

Gelati Sky is a boutique, premium gelati range. The story of Gelati Sky has a strong personality driven by Gelati Sky founder Paul Scalisi’s memories of growing up in Rome, eating gelati – ‘a world where every moment seemed frozen in an amazing sensory assault and every cloud in the sky made you feel it was about to rain gelato’. We were looking for something that was strikingly unique, represented his story and would create conversation. The communication platform of ‘it’s what dreams taste like’ was derived out of the brand strategy definition for Gelati Sky conducted by Brand DNA.

The goal was to express these feelings through the package and the tastes through the flavors. The concept that we came up with was born out of these ideas. We combined the imagery of Italy with objects that looked like the flavor to create a unique, organic and scrumptious shape for each flavor. The packaging looks like it is part of memories and dreams from Italy.

Gelati Sky started as a boutique Gelati range servicing restaurants and specialist food shops. The packaging was the strongest step to building a brand consumer could connect with. As small ultra premium brand, the package needed to take on a more delicate personality than the bigger, more established companies. The package needed to not only reflect the personality and story but also to look different while still maintaining premium feel. The taste of the Gelati is simply amazing and we knew that if we developed a rich, beautiful label, one that would get buyers and customers excited it would be very successful.

“Every presentation we have done when I pull the containers out of the box the first word is WOW! Then they taste the product and they say WOW again! I think we got a winner.”

Paul Scalisi
Managing Director & Gelati Chef
Gelati Sky

Client: Gelati Sky
Brand identity, brand strategy and packaging for retail gelati brand Gelati Sky.