Cherries two ways
Reviewed by Kinda Savarino
Recchiuti Confections is a San Francisco-based gourmet chocolatier that creates chocolates with unique flavour combinations. Using traditional European techniques, with locally sourced ingredients from Northern Californian farms and markets, Recchiuti’s chocolates have earned a loyal customer base and several accolades.
After 25 years in business, Recchiuti sought the expertise of Manual – a local design studio – for a brand overhaul that would modernise the chocolatier and represent it more fully. Core to this new rebrand is the concept of ‘sublime balance’ – a quality that Manual notes came up several times in its interviews with customers. ‘Sublime balance’ refers to Recchiuti’s skill at creating artful flavour pairings, and its ability to find the sweet spot between Sweet+Tart, Comfort+Discovery, Friendly+Fancy, Art+Science, Elevated+Whimsical….
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Western Union
Love St. and Co.
Western Union has felt like a high street mainstay. It’s black and yellow signage is easy to recollect, its logo, however, not so much. An uncomfortable overlapping of an ‘W’ and ‘U’ offered little cognitive prompts to latch on. There was clearly an opportunity to, at the very least, generate something with a modicum of creativity. The new monogram is straight from the modernist playbook, an elegant synergy of two letters. I’m surprised I’ve not seen this before. Even a quick Google image search didn’t pull up something similar. Nice. Everything around this has been modernised by Love St. and Co.; the yellow is saturated and the type friendlier. A much needed refresh.
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Delicious morsels
Reviewed by Thomas Barnett
Few countries on Earth take their food as seriously as Italy. It’s not difficult to justify the enormous pride Italians take in their spectacular culinary heritage, with their cuisine considered the ‘most exported’ on the planet. But while the wider world is undeniably in thrall, Italians’ patriotic palettes create and necessitate a notoriously conservative domestic cooking culture. Italian ingredients, recipes and traditions are lionised above all others, and are fiercely protected from compromises in the name of such tawdry things as convenience.
This is a tricky (albeit delicious) landscape in which to successfully establish a small burgeoning food chain dedicated to creating nutritionally-balanced, individually-portioned pre-prepared lunches aimed at time-scarce white-collar workers. This deceptively mundane mission statement involves sailing against prevailing winds on not just one but three fronts: prioritising healthiness as much as deliciousness; overcoming Italians’ natural distrust of pre-prepared food; and daring to be a chain in a country that is also territorially proud of its independent eateries. This is the daring mantle taken up by plucky up-start start-up Erbert. Founded in 2020, Erbert is a small chain of five shops scattered throughout the city of Milan. Erbert started life as a health-focused supermarket, but it has repositioned as a fast food restaurant serving healthy, ready-to-eat meals.
Its choice of location is strategically wise: the North of Italy significantly leads the rest of the peninsula when it comes to demand for ready-prepared food. This tallies with broad generalisations about the North of the country being more urbane, cosmopolitan and homogeneously European than the more traditional South. And yet, according to a survey of office workers and students, still only 42% said that consuming a ready-prepared lunch was a ‘daily habit’…
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Now on Brand Archive:
Reddit by Pentagram
Brand Archive is a new research tool from the team behind BP&O. Discover a long history of corporate identity design, from the 1960s to present day. Using our custom built filter, discover individual assets from signage, to packaging to liveries, drawn from over 700 brands.
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