Collard & Mustard - Full Branding

Overview Collard & Mustard makes food from scratch, and the brand needed to live mostly on cloth caps, polos, staff uniforms. That's a constraint most food branding never has to face, and it rules out a lot before the first sketch.

The problem Embroidery is unforgiving. It loses fine detail, closes small counters, and flattens gradients to nothing. A mark designed on screen and stitched afterward usually arrives as a blurred approximation of itself. Meanwhile "made from scratch" is the most crowded claim in food every kitchen says it, so saying it isn't the same as looking it.

The approach The system was drawn for thread first, screen second. That single decision set everything: a heavy brush script with thick, confident strokes that survive stitching at small scale, no thin hairlines, no fine detail that a needle would swallow.

The monogram does the rest of the work. C and M are drawn as one continuous stroke a stem curving up into a leaf so it reads as initials and as a growing plant at the same time. It's the smallest applicable mark in the system, which is why it can sit alone on a cap side panel where a full wordmark would be illegible.

Primary lockup: monogram over script wordmark with "Made from Scratch" letterspaced beneath

Horizontal lockup for chest and sleeve placements

Standalone monogram for small-scale and secondary positions

Two-color palette deep field green and mustard yellow the name literally rendered as color, and a pairing that holds on either ground

Embroidery applications across caps, polos, and apparel, including tonal green-on-green treatments where the brand reads by texture rather than contrast

Digital-ready versions of the same lockups for menu, packaging, and social

What it gave the client One mark that works stitched, printed, and on screen without redrawing. A palette where the brand is recognizable even in tonal green-on-green, which is what a uniform actually looks like in a kitchen. And a system built around three lockups, so any new merch item has an obvious answer rather than a new design decision.

Closing A brand that lives on cloth has to be designed for thread. Anything else is a logo that happens to get embroidered.