Borrow this: the supermarket own-label
What independents can learn from the humble own-brand range and why making different things look
as though they belong together is more useful than making everything look the same.
There is something rather satisfying about a well-stocked supermarket shelf.
Not necessarily the washing powder or 14 varieties of baked beans, but the moment when a group of products starts to behave as a family. Different shapes, different sizes, different purposes – yet somehow you know they belong together before you've properly read the label.
Supermarkets have become particularly good at this.
The best own-label ranges no longer look like the cheaper understudy to the “real” brands. They have identities, hierarchies and points of view of their own. Some are deliberately plain. Others borrow the visual language of delicatessens, pharmacies, farms or rather expensive kitchen cupboards.
Whatever the approach, the clever bit is usually the same: recognition without repetition.
And there is something here worth borrowing.
A family resemblance
A good product range is a little like a good family. You can see the resemblance without everybody having to wear the same jumper. Look along an own-label shelf, and there will usually be a handful of things doing the heavy lifting.
Perhaps the typography stays put while the colour changes. Perhaps every label follows the same grid. The photography might have a particular character, or an illustration style appears repeatedly. The name sits in the same place. Materials are consistent. A stripe, a border, an oddly specific shade of yellow.
None of these decisions is particularly remarkable in isolation. Together, they create recognition.
That matters because customers rarely encounter a business in the beautifully controlled circumstances of a brand presentation. They find one product on a shelf. An Instagram post on the train. A box arriving through the letterbox. A price list. A market stall. An invoice.
The job of an identity is to make those fragments feel related.
The independent problem
Small businesses often approach each new thing as a separate design problem. A new candle needs a label, so a label gets designed. Then comes a Christmas box. A workshop. A gift voucher. A new service. A newsletter. A sign for the door.
Each might be perfectly nice.
Six months later, none of them quite look as though they came from the same place.
This is especially easy when you are both running the business and creating its communications. There is always a new font to discover, a different Canva template to try or a moment when the particular shade of green you've been using suddenly feels terribly dull.
Supermarkets don't have this luxury.
They might need an identity to work across olive oil, washing-up liquid, sourdough, dog biscuits and several hundred other things. The system has to accommodate difference without losing the thread.
An independent might have considerably fewer products, but the principle is just as useful.
Decide what stays still
The trick isn't to design every possible application in advance. It is to decide which elements of the business don't move.
Perhaps that's one typeface, used confidently. A consistent position for the name. Three colours rather than 23. A particular photographic approach. The same label stock. A way of writing product names. A border. A stamp. An illustration style.
Choose a few things and be unusually faithful to them. Then allow the rest to change.
A florist might use the same simple label across bouquets, workshops and seasonal collections, changing only the colour or botanical illustration. A coffee shop could give its bags, loyalty cards, menus and retail products the same typographic backbone without turning everything into a matching set.
A maker introducing a second product shouldn't necessarily ask, what should this one look like?
A better question might be:
What should remain the same so people know it's ours?
Leave room for the next thing
Another useful lesson is hidden in the supermarket aisle: good systems anticipate growth.
The first product is relatively easy to design.The eighth is where you discover whether the idea actually works.
If your identity depends on every product being photographed in one particular ceramic bowl, what happens when you start selling something that doesn't fit in it? If every variety has already been assigned one of your four brand colours, what happens when number five arrives?
A good visual system has somewhere to go. This is worth thinking about even when your business is tiny.
You might only make three things today. But perhaps there will eventually be 12. You may sell flowers now and workshops later. A restaurant might add pantry products. A photographer might introduce books and prints. A studio might become a shop.
You don't need to know exactly what comes next. You simply don't want your identity to make it unnecessarily difficult when it arrives.
Consistency is not sameness
This is perhaps the part worth borrowing most. Consistency has acquired a slightly dreary reputation. It sounds like brand-guideline policing: logos placed exactly 12mm from the corner and somebody telling you that you have used the wrong beige.
But good consistency isn't about making everything identical. It is about creating enough familiarity that you can introduce something new and have people understand where it came from. That's what the supermarket own-label does remarkably well. The bottle changes. The flavour changes. The photograph changes. Sometimes almost the entire pack changes. And yet, halfway down the aisle, you recognise the family.
For an independent business, that recognition is valuable. Particularly when you don't have the advertising budget to keep reminding people who you are. So next time you're making something new, don't necessarily start with a blank page.
Look at what you've already got. Work out which bits are doing their job. And borrow those.
BORROW THIS
Build a family, not a matching set.
Choose three or four recognisable elements and let them travel through everything you make.
Keep enough fixed that people recognise you.
Leave enough flexible that you can still surprise them.
And before designing the next thing, ask:
What should stay the same?