|
Opinion
Brand for CPG startups
Building a brand from scratch or rethinking one that's been around for a while is harder than it looks. Not because founders don't care about it. They do. But brand identity involves a lot of moving parts, and knowing which ones matter most, and in what order, isn't obvious until you've done it a few times.
It's not just the design (though that's where it ends up) but the thinking underneath it. The positioning. The audience. The reason the brand exists beyond the product itself. The stuff that makes every creative decision easier once it's been figured out.
Most founders tell us the process went further than they expected. That it surfaced things they hadn't thought to ask. That by the time we got to the visual identity, something had already shifted in how they understood their own brand.
That's not accidental. It's the point.
It starts before the design
Brand identity isn't a logo. It's not a colour palette, a font, or a Canva template. Those are the outputs. What comes before them – the thinking, the questions, the decisions about who this brand is actually for and what it genuinely stands for – that's the part that makes the design mean something.
Without it, you end up with something that looks fine but says nothing. It doesn't attract the right people. It doesn't give a buyer a reason to list you over the brand sitting next to you on the shelf. It doesn't give you a clear answer when someone asks: what makes you different?
The brief isn't "make it look good." The brief is "make it mean something."
What we actually work through
Every studio has a different process. Here's what we cover with every founder we work with and why each part matters.
Positioning Where does this brand sit in the category, and why? Not just "premium" or "natural" – those words have lost all meaning. What's the specific territory this brand can own? What does it believe that the market leader doesn't?
Audience Not a demographic. A person. What do they care about? What are they bored of? What does choosing this brand say about them? The more specific you get here, the cleaner every creative decision becomes.
Brand personality and tone How does this brand talk? What does it sound like in a caption, on a pack, in a pitch? Tone of voice isn't a nice-to-have, it's part of the identity. A brand that looks one way and sounds another creates confusion, not connection.
Visual identity Logo, typography, colour, graphic language. These come out of everything above not in parallel to it. Every visual decision should have a reason behind it. Not "I liked it" but "it earns its place."
Packaging For CPG brands, packaging is where everything lands. It's the shelf moment. It's what a buyer looks at and decides in three seconds whether to take a meeting. Pack architecture, hierarchy, legibility, standout etc. – these aren't afterthoughts. They're the whole point.
Tudy's Kitchen: what the process looks like in practice
Nekeia came to us with an existing brand. The product – her artisan ice cream – was excellent. The brand wasn't doing it justice.
The logo wasn't on the front of the packaging. Colour choices created accessibility issues. Flavour names were hard to read. Customers were working too hard to understand what they were looking at.
But before we touched any of that, we ran a Groundwork Session with her. A focused workshop to get under the skin of what Tudy's Kitchen actually was,not just as a product, but as a brand. What it stood for. Who it was for. What it wanted to say.
Nekeia told us it was the first time she'd been able to step out of her founder's shoes and think about her brand differently. To look at it the way a customer does, or a buyer does, rather than through the eyes of someone who'd built it from scratch and was too close to see it clearly.
The new identity gave Tudy's Kitchen proper shelf presence for the first time. Nekeia pitches with more confidence now. The brand looks like what it always was. it just finally says so.
Not sure where your brand stands? The Shelf Ready Score is a free 12-point audit that shows you exactly where your brand identity is working and where it's letting you down. Takes only four minutes.
