butta clothing
Crafting an environmentally- inspired brand identity that turns heads and changes hearts
Brand Position
The butta clothing brand produces high quality buy-it-for-life fabrics for a life in the mountains, that protect life in the mountains.The brand chose ‘butter’ and uses butter-y colours throughout the identity to make discussions about global warming, melting ice caps, retreating glaciers and shorter snow seasons less politically charged and more colloquial, so the narrative can be moved, and hopefully, power democratised.
The Product
The fabrics are built for a life in the mountains. Heavyweight, reinforced cotton, designed to last. An oversized streetwear style that marries contemporary fashion with the hip-hop hype of the 90s which defined much of the ski & snowboard ‘alt’ culture.
The weight of the product has a luxury feel and consumers spending more on climate conscious purchases do expect to spend more, but they often get less for it - products that have lighter production investment and quality that doesn’t have longevity. Instead butta delivers a high quality-feeling, and actively draws carbon down in doing so.
The Project: Brand Strategy
The founders want a visual identity that changes the climate narrative from one of crisis to one of action, an identity perfectly aligned with the visual and verbal identity of ski & snowboard / winter mountain culture.
The Project: Deliverables
Brand Design
Art Direction
Website Design of the e-commerce product
An identity unmistakably part of the mountains, their environment and their winter sports, climate consciousness community.
Our Review
We loved the playful way the brand is making a challenging narrative friendly, yet without losing an ounce of its meaning - the mountains with melted butter running down them (in place of white snowcaps) are a powerful visual message.
We do think though, that yellow firstly remains an aggressive colour naturally and also that it inherently clashes with the visual language and the beauty of the mountain environments and their natural tones: bright whites, lush greens, granites.
From a fashion POV, the current bold / over-characterised brand mark has too little white space and too many different geometries to fit in with the refined aesthetics that shoppers at this price point are seeking.Additionally, with the products being the hero, the current art direction did not stand out amongst competitors and wasn’t recalled during our user tests / panels.
Refining the Brand Mark
The brand mark was crafted with a cursive font that was, loose, free, flowing to create a feeling that butta creates things by hand - a mark of luxury and quality - both because of the inferences of compassion, care, quality, of the garments but also to represent the anti-industrialist, pro-nature agenda of the brand. And to represent, the aloof ideal of mountain lifestyle that the audience adores.
Similarly, the font and the lower case decoration combine to create that same laid back vibe.We injected, throughout the brand’s tone of voice, tactile language [craft, create, carry] to reinforce the people-led labour of love behind creating the brand, and designing and delivering its products. We reinforced this quality in the brandmark with textured ‘paint brush’ strokes. Representing that the mark itself was created by hand, as well as to mirror ‘powder’ snow. Both to build parity in the imagery and in the very DNA of the brand, with not just snow, but the gold dust that defines the audience’s most cherished days on the hill to build something really emotional into the connection.
To bind the brandmark with the environments, we choose to deliver it in true white, #ffffff to mirror snow, and an off-black/grey, #1d1e1d, which we’ll discuss further in the Visual Identity.
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Visual Identity
To stitch the brand thoroughly into the very life-threads of the mountain environments the brand seeks to be one with, we use anti-contrast colour combinations of the brandmark and rich, action-packed, high-energy or high-drama photography.
In one image, you’ll see we use white on white, brand mark in white on snow and snow spray. This may seem like a poor choice for defining a bold brand, but we felt it was a powerful way to represent the butta brand’s unity with the snow, the brand is a part of it, the brand’s fate [and ours as a race] is tied to the preservation of snow and of a healthy climate.
In another, we use the second colourway of the brand mark on a dark off-grey, one picked match the dark granite of the looming faces of the biggest mountains that host the biggest lines. Again, to assimilate the brand entirely with the most emotive visuals of environment to which we want to connect it.
Art Direction
In our Art Direction we chose to use dark, moody environments. Skiing as a sport, largely happens in flat light conditions, and during short days. The typical bright and white contexts created in ecommerce shoots don’t reflect the brand’s product’s natural habitat.
The darkness also creates what, for us, felt like a much more editorial, and visually impactful, ‘haute couture’ style which elevated a perception of the brands quality, in product and style.
Similarly, the darkness was mixed during post- with a slight haziness, to add a weight to the environment, both to create further differentiation from the industry’s norms of product photography, but most importantly to convey the weight, and quality, of the products themselves and their hefty, reinforced construction.
Similarly the moodiness felt right for the brand, representing shared discontent [and the discontent of a generation] towards how the world and its leaders, governments and industry continue to march with wilful ignorance and greed towards a raging fire, whilst communities that have depended on the environment for generations, communities immersed in the environment for love and occupation and island and dessert peoples being torn from homes and livelihoods.
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Digital Design & Experience Design
We used true white paired with large whitespaces to create a luxury feel to the digital experience. The clean, crisp white background serves as an embellishing canvas, allowing each element to shine with elegance and sophistication. The generous use of space not only enhances the overall aesthetic but also provides a sense of tranquillity and simplicity - mirroring the essence of the mountain-life - for the user. This luxurious design choice immerses users in a refined and polished digital journey, where every detail is thoughtfully curated to elevate their experience and invites them to stay a while, echoing the vibe of long days in the backcountry.
To exaggerate our Art Direction choices, we chose to exaggerate the weight and choose to exaggerate the products as heroes by showing a smaller [than normal for the industry] number of products on a screen at any one time, each occupying more space.
For the same reasons, the site design and experience minimises push notifications, adverts, and banners and instead places business-critical calls to action content blocks like subscribing and lookbooks at the very top of the architecture - and uses the same spacious, confident design languages with these elements to convey that these ‘marketing’ actions are as valuable to the user as they are to the business.
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