Brand identity · 2026
A wholesaler that stopped looking like a warehouse
Northwind had spent forty years becoming a design-led supplier while still presenting itself as a pallet business. We rebuilt the identity around what the company had actually become.
Client
Northwind Supply Co.
Scope
Identity, type system, packaging, guidelines
Timeline
Fourteen weeks
Team
Four from the studio
The brief
"We keep losing pitches to companies half our size"
Northwind's sales team was being beaten by newer suppliers with worse products and better websites. Their catalog was the strongest in the category and it looked like a parts list.
The brief that arrived asked for a logo refresh. The problem was not the logo, and we said so in the first meeting — which nearly ended the engagement before it started.
What we did
Started with the catalog, not the logo
The catalog was the company's most-used asset and its worst-designed one. We rebuilt it first — a type system that handled eleven thousand SKUs without becoming a phone book, and a grid that let photography breathe.
The identity fell out of that work rather than preceding it. By the time we drew the mark, the system already had a voice and we were just giving it a signature.
They pushed back on half our brief, and they were right about most of it. The work is better for the argument.
Where it landed
Eighteen months later
+34%
Pitch win rate against the same competitor set
2.1×
Catalog requests from new trade accounts
11k
Products carried by one type system without exception