Thirty-year-old Seattle baker Essential Baking offers unique, locally made products, but these products were getting lost in the “sea of sameness” in grocery bread aisles. To break out of this commodity-product status, the baker asked design agency People People to make the brand more understandable to consumers and more recognizable on the shelves.
The new logo retains the arching sun ray theme of the previous mark, but the designers gave the image new meaning and depth. Now the sun is a loaf of bread. The arching rays create the arch of a warm baker’s hearth, and the score marks found on baked bread inspired the brand’s new typeface.
The brand’s new earthy color palette helped tackle the chore of making 20-plus SKUs on the shelf readable to consumers: deep purple for Raisin Pecan, an olive green for Rosemary, and a sunny yellow for Focaccia, for example.
Packaging also plays a big part in the rebrand. From the company’s literature: “Responding directly to consumer feedback, the design team scaled back the graphics and introduced clear packaging, allowing the bread itself to take center stage. The packaging was also engineered for real-world retail conditions, with branding placed on both the front and bottom to ensure visibility in vertical merchandising—no matter how a grocer stocks the shelf.”
