.png)
- Tone of voice
- Key messaging
- Brand uplift
- Logo design
- Colour palette
- Typography design
- Shopify development
Arrow Gift Co. (Arrow) is an independent retailer of greeting cards and other gifting products. We were contacted by the brand in late 2023, as the brand had the goal of reinventing their website and wider brand identity as a whole. As with many brands within the gifting industry, the brand had previously been selling on Etsy, but had recently started taking further ownership of their brand with a new Shopify site. However, being a relatively young brand, and one that didn’t have extensive experience with Shopify, they were struggling to get sales in a crowded market.
Unlike many other greeting card retailers, Arrow only stock their own designs, this meant that their product portfolio actually had a very consistent theme from a visual perspective. From the outside looking in, you would immediately be able to identify an Arrow card from a crowd of competitor’s products. Similarly, as greeting cards do, each card contained a unique message, joke, or pun that relayed the brand’s sense of humour.
However, the brand had not yet relayed that unique personality, design style, and sense of humour into their website or wider online presence as a whole. And so, the Arrow brand needed a fresh coat of paint.
The Challenge
Although the brand had an established and unique product within their niche, designing a card and designing a website are two completely different beasts - as are writing copy for a greeting card and for a website. Similarly, upon viewing the brands major competitors, it seemed that the entire industry was stuck over a decade in the past from a branding perspective.
This meant that we were left to infer what the brand needed from a visual and verbal perspective by lifting it from their products and translating it into an eCommerce best practice brand suite. Arrow had a ton of products for us to build from, each one giving us that bit more direction to how the brand should present itself. Plus, from talking to the brand owners, we were able to get a sense of their target audience, and how they themselves wanted to position the brand. It was then up to us to simply get our hands dirty.
- Tone of voice
- Brand uplift
The Solution
This was a two pronged project - giving the brand a framework to craft how their copy and content would come across to visitors of their site, and giving them an entirely new branding suite which would relay the brand visually. We knew the people behind the brand were talented copywriters and designers, but had simply never applied those skills to an eCommerce store as we have so many times.
A tone of voice guide that hits the mark
A tone of voice guide, as the name suggests is designed to be a framework for a brand to follow when it comes to drafting copy for all outward-facing communications. For Arrow, it seemed the brand was hesitant to relay the quirky personality that made their products so unique, into their copy. Instead the brand came across as plain and straight to-the-point.
The tone of voice guide that we produced for the brand, ensured that the brand got this fun personality across, whilst clearly and accurately relaying the quality of their product offering too.
We identified that the key elements of the Arrow brand’s tone of voice, and the questions that would inform them would be…
- The unique sense of humour and personality unique to Arrow themselves - Does the product sound as if it were produced with Arrow’s customers in mind?
- The product quality relative to the price - Does the product sound like it has value, and is of a high quality?
- The fun and positivity that is inherent to the gifting industry that Arrow operates in - Does Arrow the company sound like they are as fun and creative as their products would suggest?
- The heritage aspect of the brand as an independent family run business - Do we get across that Arrow is a family run business? And is therefore a business that values the connections between family members of its customers?
Through a series of example taglines, a brand thesaurus, and examples of the wider tone of voice in context in the form of social posts and product descriptions, Arrow were given a full scale framework that they could refer back to when writing copy for their brand. As a brand where written content is instrumental to the product succeeding, we knew that Arrow needed no help actually writing the content themselves, just to be pointed in the right direction.
A visual identity to point the brand in the right direction
Similar to their website’s copy, Arrow seemed hesitant to relay their unique visual identity into their website. A lack of colour, and overly simplistic product imagery meant that customers were given a serviceable experience shopping on the site, but were unlikely to want to come back soon, had it not been for the products themselves being such high quality.
It was again a case of lifting that colourful and quirky visual style from their products and putting it into their website and other customer facing channels. This included everything from a slightly updated logo, colour palette, and typography, to creating all new visual touchpoints, graphical devices, and even an all new font.
Logo
For the updated Arrow logo, we opted for a friendly, un-serious shape to the font characters, using a serif font so that we were not straying too far from the brand’s previous logo. And for the secondary copy, we used the hand-written font that was present across the brand’s products, closely tying the logo to the product.
Colour Palette
One thing we realised quite quickly was that, despite each of Arrow’s cards having a colourful design, they were all on otherwise plain white cards. This compounded with the fact that Arrow’s website used a lot of white as well, made the brand feel quite clinical - not how they wanted to come across at all. With the new colour palette, we looked to create a fun, and diverse palette that worked well with the designs across Arrow’s stack of cards. What we delivered was a colourful and slightly eclectic palette that tied in with the brands products closely.
Typography
For the brand’s new typography suite we not only gave the brand a series of personality matching fonts, in Gelica and Proxima Nova for primary and secondary copy, but, also created an entirely new font for the brand…
…kind of.
Through creating the new logo, we took the handwritten typography that was present across the brand’s products and greeting cards and built it into a font that the brand could use to type with. Arrow actually helped us out with this one, we may have had the original idea, but they followed through, giving us a unique character to use for the full font - coining it the “Hand of Arrow.”
New visual devices
A large portion of Arrow’s products are fronted by a series of characters, usually everyday objects that are each given an immediately recognisable smiling face - It’s a major reason you can pick an Arrow card out of a crowd.
There was an opportunity to use these characters to illustrate the brand's USPs, CTAs, and to just generally make the brand more inviting overall. As this was simply a brand uplift, we again wanted to give Arrow the direction to do this themselves, something we knew they would be able to achieve as talented illustrators, but setting them on the right track with a few examples was key.
The Outcome
Fast forward a few months later, and Arrow’s new website is going live. Whilst we were in charge of designing the UI and UX for the website, the graphical devices, website content, and copy, was all handed back over to Arrow. We were, therefore, especially thrilled to see that the tone of voice guide and brand uplift frameworks we had delivered, had been robust enough that the brand had not deviated from them even slightly. Taglines laid out in the initial tone of voice guide appeared across the brand’s social channels, the verbal style of the example product descriptions and social posts had been mirrored across the site, and the new graphical devices had been expanded upon by Arrow themselves, creating some tailor-made graphics for their new site.
The brand more than reaped the benefits of their new site too. Before working with us, the brand was struggling to make more than a few sales a day through their Shopify store, but on launch day saw more than 50 - a number we only expect to grow and grow.
If you’re interested in a new brand suite, or are looking to take further ownership of your Etsy, eBay, or Notonthehighstreet store - Like Arrow were - contact us to see how we could help you out.
Every great relationship starts with a conversation. We’d love to talk with you about your next project and answer any questions you might have about Shopify. But be warned… once we get talking about this stuff, it’s hard to shut us up!
.png)
.png)
