Tom&Sawyer was launching into a category that was already crowded with bagged kibble, raw food brands, and a flood of new direct-to-consumer pet products. The founders had a clear point of view, fresh meals made from human-grade ingredients, but no brand and no storefront yet. Everything had to be designed from a blank page, including the audience definition, which we narrowed to local pet parents in their mid twenties through mid sixties with above-average disposable income who already buy premium grocery for themselves.
The scope was unusually wide. Kristin and Peter needed a logo and identity system that could carry across packaging, interior and exterior signage at a brick and mortar cafe in Leslieville, and a responsive website that handled both single orders and recurring subscriptions. The brand needed to feel premium without feeling cold, and warm without feeling cute. It also had to read consistently across three very different surfaces (a glass storefront sign, a printed package label, and a retina-density product page) without any one piece feeling like a translation of the other.
The other constraint was operational. The in-store team was preparing fresh meals daily, so the packaging had to be functional for kitchen staff, the website had to be runnable by a small team without a designer on call, and the subscription flow had to work for a customer ordering once and a customer ordering every week. The fortunate flip side of all of this was that there was no hard timeline and no constrained budget, which let me run the brand through a deeper exploration than most launches allow.
