Jackanapes: Creating a brand
Here at Brand Monkey, we’ve got a combined knowledge of creating successful brands on Amazon. With such knowledge to draw from, we decided to try out creating a brand for ourselves. It was time to flesh out Jackanapes.
Now we’d decided on exactly what we were going to sell and settled on a name, next up was bringing Jackanapes to life. One of the most exciting parts of creating a brand is seeing your vision become a reality. With our new graphic designer in tow, it was time to create some characters, logos and labels.
With no particular brief in mind, before we could begin narrowing down to a specific design, we had to find a way to collate all our ideas. Whilst we had some idea of what we wanted – mostly to include our iconic monkey character in there somewhere – we needed some more guidance. With so many chilli sauces and spicy jams out there, how were we going to make something unique?
After several calls to discover the vision the team had for this brand, our graphic designer, Sian of Spryce Designs, sent us all to Pinterest. It was the perfect place for us all to have some input without overlapping each other. Pinning anything and everything that inspired us, we included:
- Competing chilli labels
- Colours and patterns
- Characters
- Recipes
- Product photos
- Heat charts
- Other brands and their socials
Essentially, anything we liked was valid. Once the board began to fill up, Sian collated it into two separate mood boards and sent us all a brand proposal.
The first had a fun, playful design, with a sticker style that we really liked. We thought it would look great on the labels and on social media. The bright colours were also a hit, really standing out against potentially blander colours. Think of Amazon like a supermarket shelf or a shop window. There’s lots of competition directly around you, so you have to try and make yours as eye-catching as possible.
The second mood board was slightly more structured in design, with a more muted colour palette that could potentially represent the chillies themselves. We really loved the colours of the second board, but preferred the fun, sticker style of the first. So, we decided to combine the two.
Sian also created a mood board of our photography preferences. As you can see below, we were all particularly drawn to lifestyle images. With chilli sauces and jams, people will be generally be using them in their cooking. Adding product images that help customers visualise using it can be really beneficial in pushing sales.
Now we had a clearer direction for creating a brand, Sian got to work on the main logo. It’s an element of the branding that would appear everywhere – the label, Amazon, social media. It had to be memorable. With the guidance of the mood boards and the sticker-style we liked, Sian tested out different fonts and played around until we found a style that gave off the right tone for Jackanapes.
She found a fun, free typeface that was legible but still had that handwritten feel. We thought it would really work well with the hand-drawn characters that we had in mind. Keep reading to find out more about those…
We also liked that it could be used with or without a sub-line, depending on if we decided to branch out into other categories and products in the future. Keeping the doors open, shall we say?
Consistency when creating a brand is really important. Customers begin to recognise your brand and associate certain elements with you, including your font. It seems like such a simple element but getting specific is what can elevate your brand. Even down to being really precise with your colour palette.
The hashtag codes are your best friend. If you just guess the colour each time you might get close with your shades, but there’ll always be that slight variation. A consistent brand screams quality.
We ended up steering more towards our second mood board’s colour palette, and when we combined our logo with some of the colours, we knew we were onto something.
We loved how the white sticker style made the logo stand out and the colours really lifted off the page.
Now we had our fonts and colours in place, Sian moved on to our two characters – the monkeys and the chillies. We wanted bespoke, hand-drawn characters that would be recognisable and fun.
Again, a lot of creating a brand is about playing. Having the freedom to try different things just to see if they work and how people react and engage with them. Sian spent a lot of time working on the chilli characters – researching different designs already out there, deciding on their expressions, body language and personalities.
