For Jessica Dimcevski, founder and creative director of the New York branding studio Blurr Bureau, developing the visual identity for Yes! Apples, a collective of small, family-run apple orchards in New York, came pretty close to the dream brief. It’s one that’s quite rare for a design team to come by, because the produce aisle in any supermarket is almost devoid of branding, except, of course, for those glorious stickers you find on fruit (that Kelly Angood is so good at collecting). “In a space that hasn’t already been saturated by branding, we got to set the benchmark for how a brand can show up in the category,” Jessica says.
Despite Apples being one of the most “culturally embedded foods we have – from Adam and Eve through to Apple Mac’s!”, says the founder, the red and green globes actually turned out to be quite difficult to brand at first. “One of the biggest challenges behind this brief was that apples have historically been marketed as a commodity, and commodities are hard to scale,” Jessica says. The brief therefore posed a much larger strategic question than just a simple refresh on the products packaging. So, Jessica says, the team asked: “What would it look like if apples were marketed more like a modern consumer brand, rather than a traditional produce item?”