Creating the Maple Rush Brand

Now we were in a position where we thought the project had sure potential needed to take it beyond a fun little experiment into a marketable brand that our customers could fall in love with.

We knew the core principles of the Maple Rush brand would be its integrity and strive for perfection, not just in style and quality, but in social and environmental responsibility. However, unlike many ethical and eco-friendly brands, we were also clear that the business’s ethics were the icing on the cake and that beautiful jewellery and a fun, pleasurable customer experience would be at the brand’s core.

Now we needed to create an identity to help the products make a connection with our customers and communicate the essence of our brand. Lucky for us, as our main jobs we run the ethical brand consultancy Scamper, and so we had all the necessary knowledge and resources that we needed for this part of the business development. As a consultancy, it was a nice change for us to be able to apply our skills to a project of our own and experience the client's and consultant's point of view simultaneously.

The first aspect of the identity that we needed was a brand name. We were clear that names such as ‘eco-jewellery’ and ‘green jewellery’ were uninspiring and lacked distinction, and that such a name would condemn the brand to a niche market of hard-core environmentalists. We want our brand to appeal to a much wider market, not just because it makes more commercial sense, but because we believe that genuine environmental progress requires ethical brands to compete head on with mainstream brands on the market. After much brainstorming, analysis and checking availability of domains and trademarks, we chose Maple Rush as our brand name, as it was distinctive, easy to spell, pronounce and remember, and was suggestive of the great pleasure that can be derived from nature is beautiful and delicious offerings.

Then we designed the logo, which would also provide the basis of the overall visual identity. We steered away from cliché logos with green tree icons and created a logo design that is feminine, fun and simple. What we did do was add the finishing touch to the logo with an abstract representation of a maple leaf, which not only completed the logo aesthetically, but also provides a distinctive icon that we can use independently in our visual communication. We originally chose a deep orangey red like maple leaves in the autumn as the colour of the logo, and then added a hint of pink to give the identity a more feminine feel.

Scamper's brand identity creation process told us that in this case the brand needed a slogan to quickly communicate what it stands for to the target market, as it is a new brand and its nature is not inherently obvious from the brand name or logo. We experimented with various different options and settled on “yummy, earth-friendly jewellery”. It very clearly and concisely states what the brand is about, has a relaxed, informal tone and also reinforces the idea that the jewellery is to be not just pretty, but delicious!