Intro:

A family owned women’s fashion business approached us to help them get a new venture off the ground. A new line of vintage style dresses and robes for girls. They were in need of a complete brand from the ground up. A brand strategy, a name, a message, and a visual brand identity with an online presence.

Digging for meaning:

As is with every new project, we first seek to dig past the surface and get an understanding of what’s truly driving the founders. To begin, we always start with a question that serves as the foundation of the entire project: 

Beyond profit, what are you trying to accomplish?

In some cases the answer is outright, in other cases it can take a few meetings.

We had a number of conversations with the founders about their history in the industry, what they’re passionate about, and their core values as people. Two interesting themes kept arising:

1. The idea of kids feeling proud, both on the inside and out.
   
2. Re-living nostalgic memories, and creating an atmosphere of freedom and joy.

Rolling out the Brand Strategy:

We then ran a series of interactive workshops to help shape our brand strategy and positioning. We eventually narrowed down all the discoveries into an internal brand manifesto, one that holds within it, the purpose, mission, and vision of the brand.

“Company Name–provides authentic fashion clothing for children, so proud mothers can feel nostalgic, while their children experience true happiness and freedom.”

Once we had a manifesto and a strategy path we systemized the discovery into four positioning containers:

The Origin.
The Personality.
The Experience.
The Convenience.

The conclusion of this segment left us with a clear path towards a brand that brings the nostalgic atmosphere of the past into the forefront of our present.

We gathered our discoveries from the strategy and began applying real life scenarios and examples that express our brand’s core attributes:

– Simple Joy.
– Nostalgia.
– Being in the moment.
– Feeling proud.
– Simple happiness.
– Vintage-Style clothing.

Name Concept:

We developed a concept for our brand name that represents the brand’s purpose and vision, that being of helping children live in the moment, and bring out a child’s imaginative and playful spirit.

Through research we learned about what it means for a child to be simply happy and imaginative, and came up with a theme that represents simple joy; Hopscotch.

The game Hopscotch represents the child’s ability to make any scenario fun and imaginative, a timeless game created in an era when kids played freely in the streets, a time when authentic friendships were made. Another key word in our naming strategy “view”. This was derived from the concept of a vignette. A vignette that holds within its centre a memory, a moment of nostalgia and inspiration.

Hopscotch-View. A conceptual experience of peeking into a vignette of a hopscotch-like memory. We, the founders, and the brand strategy itself all connected well with this concept, but Hopscotch-View just doesn’t feel like a classy fashion brand that’s bringing back pre-war clothing design.

After a few more key exercise to help finalize the name we arrived at the perfect solution for this fashion brand’s name: VueMarelle. Hopscotch-view translated into french. The founder’s had a connection and attachment to historical french art, design, and antiques. The French language also has a special tie with fashion overall.

After running naming tests, surveys, and other legal exercises we registered VueMarelle and acquired vuemarelle.com.

The Brand Voice:

In this phase we began to develop tangible application of the brand strategy, first through verbal communication, and later on to a visual identity system.

For the brand’s voice we wanted to speak a unique language and touch the right emotion in the audience. Our goal was to bring every customer of theirs on a nostalgic journey, into a space where they can find their own “simple joy”, a term that became the brand’s catch-phrase.

Our main brand message for VueMarelle:

“VueMarelle is for simple, truly-happy girls full of freedom, dressed in authentic pride.”

This tone of voice served as our general direction for all brand copywriting applications, such as web, and advertising campaigns. 

Other key messages that highlight their theme: 

“Bringing back the lost art of simple happiness” 

“Set your imagination free”

“A joy in being here, together” 

The Visual Identity System:

With a strategy set in place, and a brand messaging, it was time to bring it all to life with a visual language. A full visual identity from the logo, word-mark, fonts, colour palette, image style, and supporting graphic elements.

We visually honoured the significance of a classic fashion elegance, but the strategy revealed that VueMarelle has unique factors that needed to be expressed, and the mission-driven company needed a visual representation that goes beyond the simplicity of elegance and minimalism. We positioned VueMarelle as a fashion brand that is bridging history with the present and future.

The concept of framing an emotion threads through the visual identity. The identity portrays confidence for young ladies. Merging nostalgia with simplicity and joy, VueMarelle’s visual identity system is a balanced blend of European minimalistic elegance with striking contrast and confidence.

The Impact.

With the new proposition, brand messaging, visual identity, and website, PerfectDeed elevated beyond any other crowdfunding platform, and instead transformed non-profit management to a new meaning. The start-up has already partnered with dozens of organizations, breaking barriers in crowdfunding, and helped a diverse range of non-profits achieve their goals.

“Working with FlipTheWorld felt less like we’d hired a firm and more like we gained partners. FlipTheWorld helped us reveal our purpose and turn our unique vision into a reality that would get people to think differently about fashion.”

Jacob Lebron
CEO & Founder of VueMarelle