Hi, and welcome to our first blog! These are exciting times and it's all a bit new, so here goes..
First up a little bit about us.
Daniela and I have been together for 10 years and we have two adorable children, Ruby and Bruno. Dani has been involved with the fashion industry most of her working life successfully running her own wholesale fashion agency. Me, well I’ve worked in the TV/film business for the past 20 years or so and needed to spend a bit more time with our young family.
For some time now we’ve been looking to move into fashion retail and have dipped the proverbial toe in the water with a couple of Pop Up fashion stores in the East End.
Then we got the opportunity to purchase Meet Bernard, being locals, we jumped at the chance. It was one of our favourite stores and could see the huge potential there.
Let's face it, Meet Bernard has been successfully serving South East London for the past 10 years, we knew it would be right for us. We loved the name so decided to leave it well alone. However, we did want to freshen up the brand and bring a new vibrancy to the business, to make our mark so to speak.
To help us with this rebranding we turned to Marmalade on Toast, one of the countries top creative/branding agencies. We love what they have designed for us and have been hugely impressed by what they have delivered.
We put a couple of questions to them for their angle on how they saw things….
How did you find working with our challenging demands?
‘You are both really interesting people, excited about what you are doing and that excites us as an agency. Your passion is what we look for when working with clients and after spending some time with you, we quickly discovered you both have very individual personalities and ideas and we wanted to harness this in the new brand.’
The new Logo and typeface look amazing; can you talk us a little bit through the development?
‘Sure. Well the idea was to create a sharp, minimalist and clean-cut identity for the brand. We explored many, many typefaces, colour schemes, symbolic references and came to a unified piece of branding. The core colour scheme is monochrome, which is also used as a device to separate the menswear and womenswear allowing the products to take centre stage.’
We really love the Graphic Element of the new Logo (O & +) how did you come up with that?
‘The graphic element was derived from two places. The location of the store sits on the Meridian Line, which we thought was pretty cool so we wanted to explore this. We also wanted a way to represent both of your personalities, and to become part of the narrative. So we de-constructed the Earth symbol and used the two shapes to represent Ryan (Menswear) and Daniela (Womenswear). The symbols are now used throughout the branding and soon to be in the store in subtle places to accent the brand.’
So that’s it folks, we both feel really lucky and excited to be going on this journey, to be given the opportunity to bring fresh ideas to our loyal customer base and to introduce our brand to a new generation.
We look forward to seeing you in store soon.
Ryan & Daniela
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