Unpackaged
Shop Fit / Marketing Material / Nov '07

Unpackaged is a company that aims to sells produce without packaging, by means of a self serve system. The consumer can bring and refill their own containers — thus eliminating wasteful packaging and its associated costs, unnecessary landfill, and the carbon emissions of packaging manufacturing.

It’s quite a challenge to brand something that removes the very thing that is the usual vehicle for branding — packaging. To make matters more complicated the company initially sold only from market stalls making it even harder to brand with signage. As far as the need for an identity was concerned, we were conscious that in order for this to communicate the philosophy and not just look like a cheap’n’cheerful wholesaler, the branding was key to articulating the quality of the produce and also to introduce this concept of shopping to a new and wider audience. We have always had in mind the clients long term vision of this kind of retailing becoming as popular and as widely available as supermarket style shopping. The brand has been designed to stand up to this kind of projected use. We developed a logo that uses a classic jar shape, a jar being a container that can be re-used an infinite amount of times and have universal use. It also introduces the idea that this brand is about packaging or rather the lack of it. The typographic element of the logo is drawn up to look as if it has been made from a thin strip of paper that could have been torn from packaging.

Initially for the market stalls, and with a very tight budget, we branded the generic food troughs that were being used to hold the goods with hardwearing vinyl. We made signs from reclaimed wood and printed fliers and price cards on recycled paper stocks with vegetable inks.

The market stalls were a great success and the owner upgraded to a shop. The premises being a grade 2 listed heratage Victorian dairy, which while being very beautiful posed a lot of issues — we were not allowed to renovate or build into it — however the original features ultimately provided the inspiration for the shop fitout. We also had the challenge of making a shop with an antiquated appearance look like it sells a new concept in shopping. The flooring of the shop is made of black/white chequerboard tiles which we felt held a certain modernity, so we used that as a basis for the integrated furniture. Custom made freestanding units were built, each with the same footprint as a tile, and they were coated in black or white food grade paint to give the impression of them growing up from the floor into a kind of cubic landscape. In the tops of these we housed perspex lined troughs to hygenically hold the loose produce, and capped the openings with a jar shaped hole. All the negative spaces cut from the lids were painted and used as chalkboards in the shop to avoid any waste.

The exterior of the shop still has the original handpainted gold leaf signs for the old dairy and we felt it was important to celebrate these rather than cover them up — the shop is a very fondly regarded local landmark. Hence using the large windows to house our signage of grids of jars based on the logo. These were cut from gold mirror vinyl and applied to the glass to compliment the old signs above, subtly creating a very branded exterior.

A main part of the signage needs was to articulate the method of self service: fill, weigh, pay and save. We created a 4-stage instructional diagram that used the rounded jar shape in the logo to inform the drawing style of other icons: weighing scales, a till and a purse.

When designing the shop and marketing material we tried to respect the client’s philosophies and minimise wastage. For the shop invitation we collected and cut out hundreds of cereal and detergent boxes, and foil stamped directly over the existing graphics. This was interesting for us as it not only made a comment on consumerism but also had unique outcomes visually.

We feel the shopfit itself provides a nice metaphor for the concept behind unpackaged — re-use of something old to house something new.