Fern

Creative Direction / Photography Direction / Strategy / Design

Brandless, a company originally known for $3 pantry staples, was going through a test and learn period to work towards profitability and to elevate the product assortment. One of those tests was a soft home line. Merchants carefully sourced these products for months, and spent almost a year developing a launch assortment. Leadership decided that this home line would have its own identity, and introduced as a sub brand of Brandless. Myself and the Head of Brand took some initial looks at naming, logos, and a homepage experience. Ultimately, we hired a branding agency, Pearl Fisher, to help us to not only create an identity, but to help strategize this new sub brand.

Since Brandless halted original operations in February of 2020, this project did not fully launch.

The Challenge

Fern was initially planned to be a sub-brand of Brandless, and there was a lot of strategic thinking behind what that experience was going to be like. Product, Marketing, and Merchant teams came together to decide how to go to market with a category of items that was very new to Brandless. At the same time, Brandless’ customer base was shrinking due to drastic changes in assortment in the 6 months prior, so an added challenge was figuring out how to reengage those existing customers with higher price point items as well as obtain new customers during this process.

Identity

Pearl Fisher, a Branding Agency located in San Francisco, was tasked with creating the identity for Fern. The inspiration for the name and logo was bringing nature indoors, using organic and responsibly sourced materials for all of the products. The logo mark was inspired by the angles of the products, folding them in to create the shape of a house, alluding to this collection for the home.

Inspiration

The inspiration for the look of Fern was inspired by the stories behind the products. Bringing the outdoors in, elevated yet approachable, and timeless appeal all became guiding principals in creating visuals for a brand. I wanted to connect nature to the home through natural textiles and fabrics, create an elevated brand through refined photography and typography, all to help create modern designs that can live beyond the seasons.

Photography Art Direction

Working closely with the merchants, I partnered with a freelance Art Director to help visualize each shot we needed for this launch collection. we started by pulling together the list of products and deciding how we wanted to group them. Researching competitors and other e-commerce shopping experiences, we decided to group the products by room. This allowed us to better refine the direction we gave the Art Director for individual shots.

Photoshoot

To maximize costs and to keep consistency, we combined a video and photoshoot together with a producer we’ve frequently worked with in the past. This allowed us to get video and photos at the same time and provide one cohesive story, whereas in the past there had been inconsistencies in looks and sets since all were shot at different times and locations. The art direction deck that I worked with the Art Director on became our set bible, and with the chaos happening with the 12 crew members, it really became beneficial when video for one shot was happening at the same time as photos for another and I could not be in two places at once. Overall, the team was very happy with how the photos and video turned out with a relatively small budget.

Lookbook

Our PR team requested a lookbook to share with the press and other influencer partners ahead of the launch. This is where I was able to really start to see this brand come to life, incorporating photography, typography, colors, and testing out an icon system. The purpose of this lookbook was to introduce the collection and provide enough information for the press to write about. The outline of the lookbook was inspired by previous ones that I had created for Brandless, specifically for the Baby and Pet Launch, where I helped define what a PR lookbook outline would consist of and content suggestions. I worked with our freelance copywriter to create content, specifically on the “why” of Fern and why Brandless was launching a soft home line.

Amazon Shopping Experience

The Marketing team, Product team, and Merchant team collectively decided that the best way to sell Fern was to be on Amazon. Knowing that we would be starting with a brand page, I did some research of other home brands on Amazon and how they told their brand story and what their shopping experience was like. I started designing some comps using modules I found in my research, working on a couple variations of how the content could be organized.

Ad-Like Objects

Initial look and feel explorations included some ad-like objects and marketing materials, and how they could potentially come together.

Creative direction: Kelly Zerbe
Copywriting: Jen Skanke
Photography art direction: Kelly Connelly
Photography / Video: Prema DiGrazia
Brandless In-House