Emerald City Flowers

BRANDING

Emerald City Flowers is a community-focused floral design shop. The modern, romantic arrangements are created 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.

Starting Fresh

PREVIOUS VISUAL IDENTITY

Emerald City Flowers wanted to refresh their brand after a successful year in business. They initially used a generic logo found online with accompanying colors and fonts, which lacked distinction and was difficult to read. Other floral businesses also used it. Since they aimed to build a luxurious, unique brand that offered custom creations and experiences, they realized they needed a specially designed visual identity system.

Laying down the foundation

Emerald City Flowers needed to define their identity to stand out among the numerous brick-and-mortar florists and online options. For this reason, a strategic roadmap was created after thoroughly examining their business before diving into the visual side of the design process. Through discovery, research, and an in-person workshop, we covered several topics: brand story, mission and vision, positioning, target audience, customer profiles, buying journey, touchpoints, business goals, opportunities, and areas for focus and growth.

The resulting Brand Strategy Roadmap serves as a foundation for the entire brand, guiding the visual identity process and helping Emerald City Flowers understand how to connect with their ideal audience, answer questions and confidently achieve their business goals.

Visual Identity Development

The original logo was analyzed for its strengths, such as the natural fit of green in the identity’s color palette and the hand-drawn illustration style that conveyed the handmade quality of the floral arrangements. For the typefaces, luxurious options resembled hand-lettered invitations, fashion magazines, and high-end beauty products. The color palette features soft and muted tones complemented by a modern black-and-white foundation. Variations in green and pink tones were explored, including pastel shades, deeper saturated tones, and foundational gray, black, and white tones with enough depth for the signature blush tones to stand out.

Style Board featuring logo, type, color, and style direction through found imagery

Sculpting the identity

The visual identity blends approachability and modern luxury to create a timeless style that will become more iconic over time. It draws inspiration from the romantic and sculptural nature of the handmade floral designs, each crafted with care using special techniques to shape petals into unique forms.

Primary Logo

The type-based logo establishes brand recognition and conveys the brand style with a fashion-inspired serif type featuring interconnected letters. The logo appeals to those who value style and luxury, while the interconnected letters take inspiration from the uniquely sculpted floral arrangements.

Submark

The iconic mark symbolizes the bending and manipulation of petals to create the romantic and sculptural designs that Emerald City Flowers is known for. The clean and modern design is intended to capture attention, stand the test of time, and remain versatile and readable in both digital and print contexts. Its square dimensions make it ideal as a profile icon for any social media platform.

Emblems

Several emblem variations were created from the submark to enhance the responsive nature of the brand identity system. These emblems are suitable for use as social media profile badges, stickers for delivery boxes, and designs for t-shirts worn by crew members on installation days.

Illustration

The custom-designed rose and greenery illustrations embody the sculptural nature of how Emerald City Flowers crafts their floral designs by bending and sculpting petals and leaves. The rose, a classic flower and the foundation of their beloved blush-tone designs was a natural choice. The illustrations can stand alone, be abstracted into a texture, or be used in a seamless or non-seamless pattern to create luxe moments, such as on custom tissue paper, stationary, envelopes, and letterpress textures. The illustrations also serve as background elements on the client's website.

Labels and Care Cards

The submark was designed to be iconic and bold to speak directly to the brand and be instantly recognizable on the floral delivery box labels, cards, stickers, and custom arch-shaped care cards.

Brand Photography

Multiple brand photography sessions captured Bao-Tram Do, the founder, at work, along with the floral team and their exquisite creations, showcased in various sizes and in detail. The style of the photography was light, airy, and elegant, with minimal props to retain a modern look while incorporating enough touches of color, texture, and surroundings to provide an environment for each moment, consistent with the Emerald City Flowers brand style.