Emerald City Flowers

BRANDING

Emerald City Flowers is a community-focused floral design shop based in Seattle, Washington. The modern, romantic arrangements are designed with a timeless quality for a diverse audience who value building and nurturing their relationships. The sculptural designs use only the freshest flowers with the aim to source from local, women and minority-owned growers whenever possible. Emerald City Flowers provides transparent and high-quality services that offer a luxurious and beautiful product customers can feel good about. Coming from a social justice background, founder Bao-Tram Do (BT) built the business from her desire to share her artistry, create impact through personal, meaningful connection and the belief that everyone deserves to feel special.

When Emerald City Flowers came to us looking for a brand refresh, they had already been in business for a very successful year. When they launched, they grabbed a ready-made logo off the internet with accompanying colors and fonts and just went for it.

While this first visual identity was working ok for them, it was hard to read, there was nothing distinctive about it and, in fact, they quickly found it popping up all over the internet in conjunction with other brands. Since they were trying to build a luxurious, distinctive brand that specializes in custom-designed florals and experiences, they knew they needed something specially designed just for their unique brand.

Original Visual Identity

Getting to know the brand

With a myriad of brick-and-mortar florists in Seattle along with a number of online options, Emerald City Flowers would first need to define who they were in order to then stand out. This is why we began the process by taking an in-depth look at the business to build a strategic roadmap together before launching into any kind of visual design.

Through discovery, research and a half day in-person strategy workshop, we developed a guide that would act as the foundation for the entire brand and the launching pad for the visual side of the identity design process. We dug into several areas, including:

their brand and founder story, mission, vision and values, positioning, target audience, customer profiles, their goals, needs and pain points, buying journey, touchpoints, business goals, opportunities and areas for focus and growth.

The resulting Strategy Roamap document is geared specifically towards helping Emerald City Flowers connect with their audience and talk about their story with confidence, answer questions around what they do and why it matters, and ultimately meet their business goals.

Company Overview

Emerald City Flowers is a community-focused floral design shop based in Seattle, Washington. The modern, romantic arrangements are designed with a timeless quality for a diverse audience who value building and nurturing their relationships. The sculptural designs use only the freshest flowers with the aim to source from local, women and minority-owned growers whenever possible.

Emerald City Flowers provides transparent and high-quality services that offer a luxurious and beautiful product customers can feel good about. Coming from a social justice background, founder Bao-Tram Do (BT) built the business from her desire to share her artistry, create impact through personal, meaningful connection and the belief that everyone deserves to feel special.

Identity Development

The design process began with the creation of Style Boards to quickly define the precise direction for the identity development. For Emerald City Flowers, the first round featured three boards that are each rooted in the brand strategy but taking on a slightly different perspective to get down to the heart of what felt best for the brand and their audience. While we don’t always start with three, this helped us quickly home in on the exact style, colors and type to move forward with in a refined Style Board so that we didn’t spend unnecessary time in the design phase just trying to narrow down the focus.

We also looked at what was working with the current logo. Green felt like a natural fit in their brand color palette and an element of hand-drawn illustration spoke to the handmade quality of the florals. The typefaces used should feel related to luxury hand lettered invitations, fashion magazines and high-end European beauty products.

Colors would be soft and muted over a foundation of crisp and modern black and white. Colors would include greens and pinks, with variations exploring the pastel end along with deeper, saturated tones and the inclusions of foundational tones in grays, blacks and whites with enough depth for the signature blush tones to stand out.

STYLE BOARD 1: warm and muted

STYLE BOARD 2: modern and bold

STYLE BOARD 3: classic ROMANCE

Style leads the way.

The client was excited about all three Style Boards and felt that each one spoke to a part of the brand that was important. Elements from each of the three options were selected to be included in the final. These included the fashion-inspired type and modern personality in the second and the timeless nature black and white foundation of the third with a touch of elegance in the luxe details.

The final Style Board pulled almost equal amount of elements from each of the three initial options and a color palette was assembled that took advantage of each. The crisp and classic true black and true white tones lay the foundation with a soft muted palette of pinks and green mixed with the warmth of golden wood.

Sculpting the identity

The overall direction of the visual identity blends approachable with modern luxe for a timeless style that is intended to grow in its iconic nature with time. The typeface that makes up the foundation of the visual identity is inspired by classic yet modern fashion type and has been further sculpted for softness and a custom mark that speaks to the romantic, sculptural nature of the floral designs, each created by hand.

Illustration

The custom-designed rose illustration speaks to the sculptural nature of how Emerald City Flowers creates their floral designs through bending and sculpting petals and leaves. The rose is also the classic flower that will always be their favorite and makes up the foundation of their most-loved blush tone designs. The illustration can be used alone, abstracted into a texture or used in a seamless pattern for items like custom tissue paper or non-seamless pattern along with colors to create special luxe moments, like in their stationary, envelope pattern and the letterpress business cards where the rose texture is pressed into the cards.

Labels and Care Cards

The secondary logo was specifically designed to be iconic, bold and modern in a way that would both speak directly to the brand but at the same time, be instantly recognizable on the floral delivery box labels, cards, stickers and the custom arch-shaped care cards.