Brand Strategy: What’s Behind it?

Here, we take you through the branding and design process of Han–Chiga, the Saffron Tea. Our offering allows our clients to get a different perspective on their brand, explore their audience in greater depth, and discover the secrets to making their brand a success.

Step 1: getting to know

Like any relationship, it all starts with understanding the person (or people!) behind the brand. What are your incentives to leap into the unknown? What kind of product or service do you have? Where do you want it to go, and what are you most excited or concerned about? For the founders of Han-Chiga, we started with a few key questions, which allowed Mary (one of our brilliant brand strategists) to gain insight into the overall direction. We reviewed the brand's existing website, social media presence and our questionnaire. Following that, we defined the workshop's outcomes and tailored the activities to deliver what the client needed. We established hypotheses on target audience groups, customer personas, preferred aesthetics. Our most critical step? The design of our workshop framework allowed us to shake it all up to crystallise afterwards.

Step 2–crystallising the brand's ethos

Mary facilitated a workshop that allowed the Han—Chiga and Alexandra to challenge the various brand elements constructively and confidently build a clear picture of what the brand should feel like in every interaction - and why.

We expressed the brand personality through words and visuals and fundamentally enhanced core stories to convey what the brand is all about. We defined what the brand is - mysterious, balanced, subtle and witty - and what it is never going to be - childish, distant or flashy. We opened up the brand to poke around inside and discovered more about the people and stories behind their work. We also looked outside and empathised with the customers. Together we developed and refined an authentic and lasting brand story.

All of this was etched into the Han-Chiga Brand Bible, our core brief for the label and logo design process that followed. The Brand Bible exists as a live asset for the client to consult before making decisions in the future and to help the web or graphic designers and copywriters stay on brand. All of this research allowed ALStudio to develop a visual identity that would perfectly align with Han–Chiga's core values. We then involved members of the primary audiences and sense-checked the key hypotheses. This validated and crystallised the strategic direction and helped define the design routes.

Step 3–Design

Han–Chiga is warm, approachable yet rare and precious. For this brand, how people interact with the product, the ritual of making tea is essential, so we chose warm, bold colour palettes and coupled them with modern typefaces. Every piece of work we create tells a story of the brand, so after some creative ideation with Saffron stigmas, and we incorporated this detail into some of the potential designs:

If your business could benefit from a brand strategy then fill out our inventory form now. We look forward to hearing from you.