The Brand: Upness.com
The Mission:
To create a CBD brand at the crossroad of Wellness and Skin Care. With a limited budget allocated to packaging, forcing curation rather than a custom design.
The Process:
CBD is a new and exciting industry to create a Brand. It is a cleaner and softer approach to treating stress and chronic pains, but it’s also directly associated with cannabis and therefore subject to controversy.
The challenge was clear, to be able to reflect what the brand is about, without screaming it and alienating potential customers.
The decision to not use the classic “CBD green” or a “Cannabis Leaf” in our logo, was evidence to me. First of all, it’s a little first-degree, isn’t it? Second, most of our competitors do it, and third, what if, in the future, we want to move away or expand outside of the CBD ingredient? After all, we want to sell Wellness.
The Identity:
This Brand is about Happiness, feeling relaxed and good in one’s skin. Understanding that CBD balances your state of being, either calming you or energizing you, it was all about fluidity.
Rounded edges, movement, and colors took the lead of my inspiration, on the edge of a soft psychedelic dream, with a hint of pharmaceutical minimalism, and pastel colors all around to scream youthness.
The Palette:
Colors! A lot of colors indeed. On a typical Brand Palette, I would stay focused on 3 shades, maybe pushing it to 5 including complementary hues. But in the case of Upness, we knew that we would be covering many topics and usages, from pain relief to meditation support, passing by skin and hair care, and who knows, cosmetics?
I wanted to give enough flexibility to the brand to cover each of these worlds and also to be able to speak for each key ingredient since the clean brand was about quality and carefully crafted formulations.
The Liquid Print:
Sometimes we add an icon to a logo. In the case of Upness, I opted for a signature print, the Liquid Print. Mixing a few hues from our palette, each print creates a color story that implies fluidity and dynamic. Very much reminiscing the way CBD acts on your body and system. This print is used inside each unit-carton for each of our products, as well as background on postcards, or decorative elements on our ads.
The Fonts:
With a name like Upness, the logo must follow through and carry that feeling of playfulness. I was therefore looking for a bubbly, round, and slightly retro font. Again, our IT team insisted on web compatibility, and Shrikhand, a Google font, imposed itself pretty quickly.
As always, the more statement-making the primary font is, the more minimal and humble must the supporting font be. Poppins and their playful minimalism made the cut.
The Photography:
Following the rest of the Brand’s identity, the photography must carry the playful aspect of Upness. The colors of the palette are of course included in props and backgrounds. The integration of ingredients as props is another important aspect.
Product Development:
Each Upness product is carefully crafted as a hero product. Hand in hand with the product developer, we approach each product with its own unique story, and color coding to represent both its effect and key ingredient.
In a concern of sustainability, we prioritized glass and recyclable plastics, which meant working with rather minimal and basic components. White base, to light up the colors of the labels, and rounded shapes whenever possible.
The Website:
Upness website is built with the same robust effectiveness that we are going for when we launch a new brand. Playfulness was added through display and navigation details such as rounded corners on product images, built it collages reminiscent of inspiring mood boards, and a thick pill-like button.
Social Presence:
Since we are targeting a younger demographic, our social presence is our main online setting, story telling and content must be representative of the Brand Identity, the running campaigns but also any relevant trends going on.
Online Ads:
Online Ads are about capturing the attention in mere few seconds and making the user slow down their scroll and hopefully, stop and click through. It is, therefore, crucial to keep the subject of the ad simple, unique, and eye-catching.
To that effect, the direction for the brand’s ad design is about collages, dramatic cut-outs, intense close-ups, and dynamic animations.
Emails:
Upness emails is a space where the engaged customers have the occasion to engage with the Brand on less instantaneous mode than on social, so this is a space where can dedicate our communication to education, both regarding our products knowledge, but also CBD as a whole industry
Playlists:
Because this brand is very much about creating a brand new universe of feelings, colors, and ultimately moods, it seemed like a giving to create interactive playlists to share with our customers.
