Case Study— Patagonia Branding
Client Background
Patagonia Inc. was founded by Yvon Chouinard in 1973, founded and based out of Ventura, California. It is an American clothing line selling outdoor clothing marketed to be sustainable.The demographic that Patagonia targets are young to middle aged individuals interested or familiar with sports / sporting equipment.
Patagonia’s Mission Statement
Build the best product, that cause no unnecessary harm, use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis. They specialize in regular clothing such as sweaters and hats to extremes such as climbing, skiing / snowboarding, surfing, fly fishing, train running and mountain biking.
Pataguides is a service Patagonia provides for Recommended Guide services when traveling the mountains ensuring for you to make the most of your trip. Some of the services they recommend are North Cascades Mountain Guides, Northwest Mountain School, Skyward Mountaineering by Steve House and Vince Anderson, Utah Mountain Adventures, Yamnuska Mountain Adventures.
Personal Background
Yvon Chouinard, founder of Patagonia became a climber at age 14 as a member of the Southern California Falconry Club. While he was young him and his friends gained the hobby of freight train jumping and would ride them to the end of the San Fernando Valley to the Sandstone Cliffs. This is where they all eventually learned how to climb up and rappel down the cliffs.
The Circumstances
We at Patagonia understand that trends change and not all designs are timeless so we are looking for a brand update. A designer is needed to reshape and modernize our brand. We are looking for something clean and simple, yet eye catching.
The Brief
This projects main creative brief was to update the Patagonia Brand altogether. Clean it up and make it pop with an eye catching design. The purpose is not to change the original design, that all of Patagonia’s clients are familiar with, but to simplify and update them as a whole.
Bad Idea #1 — The usage of Pink
This was my starting idea for rebranding Patagonia’s stationary & apparel. Many ideas were thrown around in the process and creation of these designs and many other ideas were also discovered along the way. For the final proposal, I did go along with a similar design from this first step design process, with the orange mountains for the logo and the simplified brown card stock paper. The pink.. would not work. It would lack targeting specific customers and cut off some totally.
Bad Idea #2 — Again with the Wood?
Bad Idea #2 includes somewhat of the same branding theme as presented before. Also included above is a rough idea of a website wireframe as well as advertisements, billboards, social media branding, apparel and additionally the stationery. Overall this style of rebranding was not the final choice. The wood theme was abandoned and a more organic / minimal with a twist was needed.
The Solution
The goal of this rebranding was to create a clean and simplified design that continued to still attract Patagonia’s current customer base while expanding them to broader groups of consumers. Orange was the chosen colour to go with to give the Patagonia Brand a Bold and Sophisticated statement and look. The off white background and the organic brown envelope with the orange combined give the rebrand a refreshing & crisp feel. The font that was chosen for the final is a serif font that works well spaced together and gives it a satisfying fresh feel. I feel that this design is bold yet still subtle in my opinion. I think the colours work well together creating a good balance in the overall design.
Patagonia Final Layout
Patagonia Inc. should be satisfied with the results of their rebranding since it has followed the criteria exactly what they were to expect. The branding started off rocky but soon grew from those ideas. The Patagonia Brand has been revamped and upgraded entirely, with a cleaned up, fresh yet simple feel. The colours have minimized still giving it a bold impression to the viewer. Hoping to portray a more sophisticated, eye catching look for their brand.
Conclusion
In the process of creating these designs much was learnt and put back into the final outcome of the Patagonia Brand. Through out the process there was immense struggle with trying decide on a certain direction to head in and how to make all designs be consistent through out the branding. Going back to the drawing board and trying to take a fresh look at the new logo and the brand, I decided to go simple and make the logo / word mark the main focal point when viewing any of the designs. Many lessons were learnt with design techniques and the usage of white space (it is not a bad thing). I feel that this final design for Patagonia Inc. complements their brand admirably.
