Trading Boundaries is a retail destination situated in the heart of the East Sussex countryside specialising in antique Indian furniture and handicrafts. Amongst the Trading Boundaries showrooms, they have a fully-licensed Café and an upstairs fine art gallery featuring the work of album cover artist Roger Dean. At night the Trading Boundaries Café transforms into a live music venue in an intimate restaurant setting. The company are also opening a Boutique Hotel on the site in Spring 2021. Toop Studio’s brief was a complete refresh of their branding including a new logo, typography and colour palette. The challenge was how to bring together all the different aspects of the business under one core identity. Shadric Toop worked closely with the marketing team at Trading Boundaries, exploring many different alternative routes before settling on a final set of assets. The wordmark was influenced by their core showroom products (colonial-era Indian furniture) and also in keeping with their future boutique hotel, to be situated in converted stables dating back to the 18th century. The elephant logo relates again to India; the company has had an elephant as a logo for many years which has evolved over time. Our version is a combination of nostalgia (we looked at victorian branding for inspiration) but also modern; the pose of the elephant was purposefully active and playful, and the circular form lends itself to social media uses and works at a very small scale, such as in a favicon in a browser tab. The new colour palette reflects the beautiful vibrant colours seen in the products in their showroom and from North India, the area where most of their suppliers are located. The primary colour palette focuses on a warm dusty pink, vintage paper cream and a charcoal grey. Alongside the colour palette, we created a set of textured backgrounds and a bespoke Indian-inspired illustrated pattern. ‘The new logo, colours and assets are working really well and we’ve received really positive feedback.’ Jenny Ross PR & Marketing Manager, Trading Boundaries
Branding Design: Trading Boundaries
Branding for Trading Boundaries
The Brief
The Client’s Response
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