Bezi was founded by Ilay Karateke – an Istanbul-raised, New York-based, ex-McKinsey consultant turned cheesemaker – and Hasan Bahcivan – a Berkeley-trained engineer from one of Turkey’s largest and most legacied cheesemaking families. Both grew up in large families, with their lives punctuated by big family-style meals shared with friends and neighbours. Labneh, a Middle Eastern spreadable cheese, was ever...
Wholy Greens is a B-Corp certified Dutch food brand dedicated to transforming the way people perceive and enjoy vegetables. Its mission is to create a mindset shift from ‘having to eat veggies’ to ‘genuinely loving veggies’ – and it uses pasta as its primary vehicle. It’s a smart set up, not least because, frankly, what experiences aren’t more enjoyable when...
Mortgages aren’t exactly the most sexy or fun concepts, nor are the companies that offer them. Likewise, the sector isn’t exactly known for a bold or forward thinking approach to brand design. But it’s often the more traditionally dull-leaning brands or companies that make for the most creative – not to mention difficult – branding projects. Perhaps that’s part of...
Since 2019, sales of beauty products labelled ‘clean’ have soared in popularity, and – as with all consumer trends, from interiors to fashion design – parental preferences influence the marketplace for children’s products as much as adults’. Enter Uoga Uoga (which translates to ‘Berry Berry’), a Lithuanian natural beauty and skincare company founded in 2010 that produces mineral-based makeup as...
Over the years, London-based Alphabetical has honed both a distinctive style and a distinctive client list: often, its most celebrated projects are those for brands or organisations that are both a unique place, and more specifically a site for a community that’s underserved or underrepresented. In short, Alphabetical has honed its knack for uniting a people-centric, frequently cocreation based approach...
The concept of a brand today rarely has a sense of physicality. The hand (or indeed roller), the mark-maker, usually feels totally absent. It makes sense really, considering our primary interaction with a brand is often online; but when a project comes along that’s so obviously delighting in the possibilities of print processes, inks and paper it feels like a...
Dessert-centric power couple Natasha Case and Freya Estreller met in around 2008, soon forming a partnership in both life and business: Coolhaus, a range of ice creams and other frozen treats that looks to inspire other female and LGBT+ founders. For those thinking, ‘what, like Rem Koolhaas?’ – yes, you’re right. Estreller originally trained as an architect, and before Coolhaus-proper...
Hanbury is an American architecture firm, founded in 1979 and based in Virginia. According to international agency Base Design, which recently delivered a rebrand for the practice, the last decade has witnessed a ‘transformative’ period of growth and diversification with the team increasing from 40 to 160 individuals, and expanding from one to eight office spaces. For Hanbury, which started...
Having grown up near Portsmouth, the Isle of Wight carries a certain resonance, though perhaps unfairly. Aged around 14, when getting served in off licences/particularly lax pubs wasn’t always a given, we’d sometimes pass the time watching the IoW ferry. It felt rather bleak, and somehow a bit futile, just bobbing back and forth between two destinations (Southampton and Cowes)...
Few things have a design legacy quite like the Olympics: it’s hard to think of another event or organisation that has both a history spanning more than 120 years (the first modern Olympics’ was in 1896), and a distinct graphic identity each time it takes place. Since every Games has its own unique ‘emblem’ logomark device, the events become sort...
For non-design nuts or print nerds, paper might seem pretty high up in the scale of banality and boringness. That’s likely the reason that the Wernham Hogg paper company was the setting of The Office: paper, and Slough, formed an easy sitcom shorthand for all that was unremarkable, trivial, and emphatically dry. But in fact, there’s a lot more to...
This took me probably longer than it should have to get my head around, but bear with me: Jaffa oranges – also known as Shamouti oranges in Arabic – are a specific variety of orange cultivated in Israel, Palestine, Cyprus, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Turkey, known for their relatively few seeds and tough skin. These qualities make them especially...
The story of Burton Kramer’s logo for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation....
Over the past few decades, high-street menu-scribbler Wagamama has become a rare beacon of actually-very-nice-food among a sea of uninspiring spicy chicken, Giraffes, and Five Guys (arguably, simply too many guys). It turns out Wagamama has some pretty big-name siblings: Mayfair’s Michelin starred, celebrity-beloved Hakkasan; Thai stalwart Busaba; Cantonese eaterie Yauatcha; and Turkish restaurant chain Yamabahce all sit within the...
There has never been more awareness of allergens and inflammatory ingredients, with lupins and sulphites now on the mainstream radar alongside common culprits like gluten and dairy. At the same time, nostalgia and anemoia (‘a feeling of yearning for a past that you never experienced’) have become driving forces shaping contemporary tastes. Direct-to-consumer cereals neatly bridge a gap in this...
The concepts of ‘money transfer’ and ‘community’ don’t immediately seem to go hand in hand: the former feels cold, slightly dry, potentially confusing and rather literally transactional; the latter is all cuddly and feelings and people-y. But uniting these two seemingly disparate worlds is exactly what DesignStudio did recently in its rebranding of Sendwave, a digital platform offering money transfers...
‘Dinner ladies’ doesn’t have the most glamorous connotations in England – depending on your experience at school, it likely conjures up memories of scoops of greying, tepid mash-adjacent slop unceremoniously plopped onto a plate; something to do with turkey dinosaurs; a troop of formidable but visibly jaded people responsible for making every school smell like on-the-turn cottage pie from around...
The official blurb that surrounds Chicago’s West Loop area is that it’s the city’s ‘hottest neighbourhood… a foodie mecca’, according to Choose Chicago, a ‘cultural powerhouse’, in the words of Landor, which recently created its new brand identity. Having never been to West Loop, or even Chicago, it’s hard to get a grasp of what this all really means. Such...
It’s not often that BP&O covers record label design. Unlike sectors such as fintech or FMCG, record labels naturally lend themselves to the more creative side of design and branding – they have far more niche audiences, and usually don’t have to work as hard as something aimed at the supermarket shelf to stand out or appeal to mass audiences....
Demand for dairy alternatives continues to surge. In the United States, plant-based milks and proteins are reportedly popular among a third of adults thanks to their perceived health benefits, as well as consumers’ increasing environmental awareness and plant-based lifestyles. Soy, of course, was the OG substitute, until almond milk came to dominate the market. But now, it’s all about oats....
Since the pandemic, sexual wellness offerings have carved out a space on the shelves of beauty and pharmaceutical retailers, from Sephora to CVS in the US, and even Boots in the UK (founded 1849). According to business insight platform Crunchbase, that’s thanks to ‘an increased cultural shift that embraced sexual pleasure as a crucial component of physical and mental health’....
For the rest of the world, Canada is synonymous with a few things – maple syrup; Celine Dion; wholesome, generally nice people; Neil Young; and when it comes to the realm of food, poutine (fries with cheese curds and gravy, for the uninitiated). Having opened back in 1969, Ashton is the oldest poutine chain in Canada. With 23 branches in...
Suburban pool party culture is rather alien to us in the UK, where only the exceptionally wealthy have pools, and we muddle along in a climate that defaults to ‘grey, fair to middling’ most of the year. But we’re becoming a little more attuned to the joys of an open air funsplash: over the past few years we’ve seen the...
LES Tigre – not to be confused with seminal electroclash/riot grrrl combo Le Tigre – is a cocktail lounge in Manhattan’s Lower East Side area, which opened at the end of last year and apparently combines ‘sophistication and refinement in drink, sound and ambiance’ with an entrance that boasts ‘an original graffiti-worn door’. So far, so hip, amirite? It all...