Wellfound Chocolate is a small business based in Boston that specializes in the production of small-batch, direct trade artisanal chocolate bars. Wellfound’s name comes from their founder's love for all things nautical, as a wellfound ship is one that’s well-stocked and ready to set sail. We jumped into this branding and packaging project with nothing but their client’s killer dark chocolate recipe and wish for the brand to incorporate nautical themes.

CASE STUDY

We began by leading Wellfound through multiple brand exercises to tease out the main elements they'd like to see represented in the brand, and then gathered inspiration through moodboards, pictured below, to visually represent the three primary brand directions Wellfound liked most.

Moodboards help bring abstract ideas down to earth, and allows clients to give feedback on design ideas early in the process. Because of this exercise, we found out that while our client at first indicated they were more interested in a bright and textured brand, after seeing the three moodboards, they were actually much more drawn to a combination of modern, bold, and delicate brand elements.

We presented two color palette options, the first with soft shades of bright hues with an emphasis on clean whites, and the second with stronger, bolder colors with an emphasis on natural parchment. Our client resonated strongly with the second direction because of its natural feel. Moving forward with the typefaces and color palette, we determined with our client that a geometric, bold look with pops of color would drive the rest of the process.

We then turned to logo design. Logo designs took inspiration from the name’s nautical origins, using the motifs of waves, shorelines, ship flags, and ropes during the iteration process.

We initially presented five logos to our client. After some reflection, our client chose three logos they liked best with some tweaks they'd like to see for each one. When our client couldn’t part with any of the logo directions, we put them in context on a few different packaging designs so they could see how the logo functioned in practice.

The final logo Wellfound decided on was the abstracted idea of a boat’s waterline. This logo made the most sense based on our client’s needs, since the form stays consistent and is easily recognizable across various mediums, but the pop of color can change to allow flexibility for new product lines or different brand implementations.

For the bar’s packaging, Wellfound’s main goal was to differentiate their product from the other chocolate bars it would be sharing shelfspace with. We presented three different directions as a starting point for our client to consider and discussed the pros / cons of each direction in great detail with the Wellfound team.

We also did some poking around at various grocery stores and compared our designs with the chocolate bars on the shelves to test which of our designs was most successful. After testing edits on each packaging direction, Wellfound settled on a final direction that really pops off the shelf and differentiates itself because of the unique layout, color, and composition.

For our final meeting with the Wellfound team, we 3D printed a mock chocolate bar to show what the final round of packaging would look like. We prepared all design files in a folder which we handed off to our client, along with transition documents that provide in-depth knowledge about how to edit the documents for copy changes, as well as how to speak about design files to vendors.

We thoroughly enjoyed working with Wellfound Chocolate - thank you for all the excellent chocolate tasting!