Branding for New England Superior Oysters.
Backstory
A guy knocks on our door and asks if it would be okay to occasionally cross our front field to access the Bellamy River so he can harvest oysters. He’d give us some in exchange.
What oysters? He was applying for a license to grow oysters in the Bellamy. We got into a long conversation about the virtues of oysters, and then into a business partnership. We – Troy Payne, Sheyne Branconnier, and I are now NESO and part of a growing community of oyster farmers in New Hampshire.
What could go wrong?
It turned out to be much harder to get our license than we expected but this saga is better told with a few beers, over a dozen oysters.
Logo design
I wanted the oyster to be the star of the show, so to speak, but oysters are complex and kind of amorphous so not great candidates for logos. My design had to meet my logo criteria – that people would wear it on a t-shirt even if they hated oysters.
Celtic designs are powerful with their interlocking shapes and symmetry. I took that approach with an oyster shell and seaweed. This was our logo for a number of months. In the context where we used it most – small tags that ship with oysters, HACCP form letterhead, web banners – the design was just too busy.
It’s seldom a good idea to change a logo once it’s out there. However, I really wanted this to be much simpler, much stronger. Our oysters were still too young to sell, so I had a little grace period.
I re-worked the logo. I took out the extra words, so to speak, and stripped it down to the lone oyster. Even if I had a shellfish allergy, I would wear a t-shirt with this logo.
The logo on wicked cute tins of smoked oysters.
Business Cards
If you spend the time and money creating a business card, they better be bold and thick. I used to wrestle with getting the precision I wanted using inexpensive business card printing companies. Now, I skip that headache entirely and only use Moo Business Cards. Their default paper thickness makes you smile when you pick up a card.
Only six lines of text – why the fuss?
When you have a sparse amount of text, and each line is important, you must be mindful of the hierarchy. Things get busy when each line is screaming for attention. This is the haiku of business card typography.
I used old-style figures for the numbers to be more readable in their context – mingled with text in a sentence or line.
With the oyster company, ordering online and calling for a pickup was slightly more important than the address. However, the email still needed to stand out. Using the word OYSTER in the phone number was a little risky – it’s harder to convert. Showing the equivalent set of numbers was an option, but I chose not to clutter the simplicity. I decided that the hassle of converting letters to numbers would further imprint the mnemonic. And, you only have to do that once as most phones save the numbers automatically.
It’s worth the time to perfect this level of detail – or you will regret it, one card at a time for 1000 cards.
Notes to self
Changing a logo is a big deal with an established brand. If you can get away with it and make the logo bolder and simpler – do it. When you can’t add or remove anything, you’ve probably arrived.