Everly James is the brainchild of an entrepreneur who turned her personal experience of corporate burnout into a curated self-discovery brand. She was inspired to bring others along through that same immersive journey of learning about yourself through your own five senses. Everly James was created for a younger audience, so they needed to understand how to speak to the needs and design tastes of their market, as well as identify their audience’s unique situations. Our team was hired to uncover how best to craft a message that resonates with these audiences and develop a visual identity to introduce this new brand to the world.
Designing a Brand for a Startup for Self Exploration
Everly James
How do we design and message a startup brand about self discovery and the five senses?
What we did:
Design Research & Strategy
We worked with the newly forming startup team to better understand their vision and market. We facilitated workshops and sessions around audience discovery, engagement strategy, creative direction, and messaging to focus on their unique positioning.
Identity Design
After conducting our initial design research, we provided their team a series of mood boards to show how the brand identity system could work and resonate with their younger target demographic. Refining those ideas led to a hand-drawn typography primary logo with supporting elements for each of the five senses as well as a smaller version of the logo for the website and product uses. The color palette is inspirational and design-forward to reflect the Everly James vision.
Messaging
To reach these new younger audiences, we needed to understand what they were thinking and feeling as well as how this brand could demonstrate the ways in which it could help them in their self-discovery journey. We found that our audiences split along two lines: One concerned with discovering new ideas, being the first to know about products and experiences to build their own identity and share with friends. The other audience was concerned about needing assistance through life changes: children, marriage, jobs, and other major events. So the tagline we developed was “Ever Evolving,” a tagline that could reach all audiences. We followed this by breaking down group-specific messaging for each kind of audience need.