With eco-consciousness more and more prevalent, plastic straws have become public enemy #1. Busy building a packaging company in the U.K., some colleagues tasked us with creating a brand that they could get into the fast-growing paper straw business. Armed with only the name, British Straw Company, we were charged with researching the market to determine how to best position a British made alternative to the usual drinking straw.

In an industry that’s often quite serious, the key to us was building an eco-friendly brand, with a deliberately emphasis on “friendly.” Fully embracing their roots and the factory’s Wales, U.K. location, we worked to create a brand with intrigue, while still establishing the company as a credible player.

We took up the challenge of creating the brand from initial concept, developing a desired aesthetic and matching logo design. Working with a talented illustrator, Thomas Shahan, we embraced a woodcut and engraving style perfectly fit for the world we wanted to build.

The design summons up an instant heritage by creating a folklore to represent the long-held traditions and well-established British approach to industry. At the forefront are design elements that establish a brand with visual intrigue, an inherent story, and an ever-present wink of sophisticated whimsy.

Applying the design across multiple brand identity needs, we created a system that could be flexible, showcase our main logo mark, but also introduce secondary elements, along with language that matched the personality of the artwork. This system was applied to all package design and marketing materials.

Ultimately the product is a premium paper straw, so attaching an identity that allowed anyone coming across the brand to be brought into our world was key, and would immediately differentiate British Straw Company from an ever-crowded market of generic alternatives.