Brand & visual
A gear brand built to survive the shelf
Full identity, packaging, and retail signage for a DTC outdoor brand's move into 40 stores. [Fictional example]
Full identity, packaging, and retail signage for a DTC outdoor brand's move into 40 stores. [Fictional example]
The overview. Haven Outdoor makes technical hiking gear direct-to-consumer, packs, layers, and hardshells designed by people who use them every weekend. Online, the brand felt fine. In front of a retail buyer, it looked like a garage project: four different greens across channels, a logo that broke below an inch, and packaging that couldn't survive a shelf reset.
I came in solo to lead identity and creative direction, with two in-house ops and production people supporting execution. The constraint: whatever we built had to hand off cleanly, since I was scheduled to roll off after launch and the brand still had to run itself.
The shift was designing around one motif, a trailhead marker, that had to scale legibly from a one-inch hangtag to a twenty-foot storefront sign. Every asset after that had to pass that test, which is what kept 40 retail doors looking like one brand instead of forty interpretations of one.
Two retail buyers passed on Haven in the same quarter, both citing the same line: "the product's great, the brand doesn't look retail-ready." Inconsistency that was invisible on a phone screen, four greens, four logo files, no packaging spec, was impossible to miss standing in an aisle.
Positioning statement.
Naming rationale.
Explored three directions: a topographic-line system, a badge/patch system borrowed from gear tags, and the trailhead-marker mark that shipped. The topo system looked great on a laptop and disappeared at hangtag size. That failure is what set the rule everything else had to follow: if it doesn't hold at one inch, it doesn't ship.
Logo suite (wordmark + trailhead mark), 4-color palette, type system, voice guidelines, 18 packaging & signage templates
Talk about gear like a hiker, not a marketer.
"Waterproof to 10,000mm. We tested it in a Tuesday rainstorm, not a lab."
Confidence backed by specifics, never hype.
"12 years on trail. Zero redesigns of the buckle."
One claim per panel, said once, said well.
"Say it once. Say it well."
The proof of an end-to-end system is that it survives contact with everything it has to run on.
First outdoor brand we've brought in in three years that looked retail-ready on day one.
What proves the system held up past launch.