The Request
A complete update and overhaul of the branding and retail environment products for an international furniture brand’s barstool gallery called Setting The Bar.
The Problem
The original barstool gallery, Setting The Bar, was not created as a formal internal brand but was built product-by-product as needs for barstool signage trickled in over time. This led to a bloated product gallery that lacked any cohesion in tone, visuals or messaging. If this gallery “set the bar” then that bar needed raised.
Which is where my team and I started with for the reimagined gallery, Raise The Bar. We needed to bring the branding up a few notches by designing a new logo, creating a more refined color palette, finding contemporary lifestyle imagery and crafting new messaging for subtext and body copy.
All of this had to be designed with the retail environment in mind. We needed products that connected to customers emotionally and yet also conveyed information about the furniture that is actually useful.
The Solution & The Challenge of Lifestyle Imagery
The original gallery was pieced together at a time when the target consumers were families with spacious homes and a budget to have large furniture like a bar or a kitchen island. The current data showed a shift in the main consumer to younger singles and couples in urban communities with smaller living areas. The new target consumers were using bar and counter furniture as a way to maximize space and not as luxury items.
This was the central concept for the new Raise The Bar gallery. The original, colorful, family-oriented design was ditched for a muted palette and imagery of urban environments. The “diner” style logo evolved into a clean, modern, more cosmopolitan design. We replaced the happy family lifestyles with an independent younger demographic.
Finding the right stock photography is a skill unto itself and the lifestyle imagery for this gallery was a particular challenge. The client wanted barstools in the photos but needed those barstools to be as generic as possible so it could pass as a product they might sell. Most of the images that check these boxes are shot in places like coffee shops and so they also had to be cropped in a way that disguised this fact at first glance.
The final result is a clean, simple, yet sophisticated design that helped the client not only market better to their new customer base but also laid a strong, unified visual foundation for future marketing campaigns.
