The Candle Establishment has recently entered the market with a range of lovingly hand-crafted candles, made from only the finest ingredients. To support its inaugural product launch, we were engaged to design the organisation’s brand identity, product packaging and ecommerce website in a market where — even for fragrances — appearance is everything.

Positioning itself as a premium product range, it was imperative that The Candle Establishment’s overarching brand identity and each of its assorted marketing touch points clearly communicated an appropriate sense of refinement and decadence, while maintaining a wide appeal. The Candle Establishment’s brand identity — the foundation of its entire product range — drew inspiration from a triangular flag, waving in the wind. This symbolism not only lends the brand implied history, as flags are typically found atop established institutions, but also doubles as a playful allusion to a candle’s flickering flame. This decidedly old-world symbol reflects the quaintness of candles, and lends a feeling of longevity to the just-launched brand.

With a prominent use of black across its graphic design style, the brand visually stands apart from many competitors’ tendency towards lighter, more delicate palettes, positioning The Candle Establishment’s range as products of luxury, mystery and sophistication.

The product packaging has been designed to extend this approach, using cylindrical containers to provide consumers with a more visual and tactile sense of the product’s form that’s otherwise lost in a standard rectangular box. The use of a marbling texture across the packaging set offsets what is otherwise an exercise in minimalism, adding depth and visual interest while communicating the creation process of the product. This marbling has been implemented in eight distinct colour combinations and is used functionally to distinguish between the range’s available fragrances.

Extensive photography showcases each of the products, and their hand-made origins. This image library makes prominent use of the brand’s largely colourless palette, and introduces imagery of fog and impossibly “floating” products to further heighten the brand's magic and mystery.

As a major deliverable of the project, we designed and developed a bespoke ecommerce website. Built to meet the client’s individual requirements, the website ensures that products not only look the part, but are also quick-and-easy for consumers to purchase. The website has been designed and developed to be just as attractive and easy-to-use no matter what device it is being viewed from — desktop, laptop, tablet or mobile.

Coinciding with the launch, we planned and implemented a social media campaign spanning Facebook and Instagram to simultaneously launch the Candle Establishment brand and seed a social media following across key audience demographics.