Wooden Banana – Natural way to grow your photo business
Lukasz Ociepka
Natural way to grow
your photo business
About the client
Wooden Banana offers high-quality personalized photo albums and wooden packaging for photo prints. The offer is addressed to photographers so that they can include these products in their offer and sell them with additional profit.
Scope of work
Brand analysis • Brand messaging strategy • Brand visual strategy • Logo project • Identification elements • Social media system • Promotional materials • Merch • Brand manual • Website – functional mockups (UX) • Website – layout (UI) • Website – development (Webflow)
Problems
For years Wooden Banana functioned without consistent visual identity, which prevented it from fulfilling its potential. Moreover, the offer transformed, changing its focus from wooden boxes to high-quality photo albums.
Brand communication needed to change. That's how to project started – focusing on creating the system that represents the new, unified approach.
Project approach
After series of workshop with the client we’ve agreed, that the most crucial was a change in the narrative about the company itself. From a product supplier, it should become a partner in the photographer's business.
The products themselves should be presented as tools for increasing revenue and strengthening the photographer's brand.
Both of these points should be reflected in the branding, which on one hand is playful and direct, and on the other represents an efficient company that delivers the highest quality photo products.
Slogan
The slogan addresses photographers' concerns related to the process of upselling products as part of their services.
The narrative suggests that including physical products into photography services is "natural" and will help the photographer "grow". On the other hand, it also relates to the brand's style and naming, which are connected with nature.
Brand symbol
The goal of the logo design was to avoid direct references to the offered products. Instead, the focus was on symbolism related to photography and the naming itself, which has a lot of potential and brings exotic connotations.
Thanks to this approach, the mark allows for a lot of freedom in scaling the company's offerings in the future.
Logo variants
The logo comes in several diverse variants, making it versatile for various uses and needs.
Apart from the standard vertical and horizontal forms, there's also a stamp version. This allows for a more dynamic presentation that can change according to the situation while still keeping a consistent look & feel of the brand.
Visual strategy
Colors
Since the naming relates to nature, the brand's color palette has been chosen to complement this. The selected colors are inspired by nature, leaves, and the bananas themselves.
Typography
To reflect the duality of the brand (informal, relaxed character and support, efficiency), two different fonts were combined. Dakota Rough – naturalistic, loose, and irregular. Larken – elegant, representative.
Badges
To emphasize the informal character of the brand in the identification system, badge elements were designed. They strengthen the casual tone of communication and highlight various aspects of the brand in a fun way.
Badges appear both in digital and physical forms, where they work great as promotional stickers.
Illustrations
To emphasize the brand's style related to wood and naturalness, illustrations inspired by tree rings were designed. They extend the idea presented in the logo.
These illustrations show artifacts connected to the brand, like cameras, lenses, photo albums, and banana leaves and should be used across all the elements of visual identity system.
This style of illustration allows to easily add more designs in the future, related to new products or features of the brand.
Icons
Set of icons represents all the key features of the brand.
The icons are designed to draw attention to these features and make sure they are noticed by the audience.
Website
New Narrative
The main goal was to create a website that matches the brand’s visual identity and storytelling style. The new site shows the brand’s key values and unique character.
Organizing Products
We aimed to make it easy for users to find products. Product categories are divided into smaller groups that help users quickly see all available options. These are all accessible in the site’s mega-menu.
Dedicated CMS
Managing a large product range can be complex. To simplify this, I created a custom CMS that makes it easy to add and edit products on the site. This system, built with Webflow, allows content to be edited directly on the site.
Digital materials
Album Guide
A guide to available types of albums, covers, and customization methods makes it easy for photographers to understand offerings.
Social media templates
Ready-to-edit templates with various options speed up the preparation of posts and stories published on brand profiles.
Landing
A tool to sign up for the 'Banana Mail' newsletter, which provides tips on selling albums as part of photo services
Sub-brand
The Wooden Banana Party is a recurring event that takes place twice a year, during the biggest events for photographers – Way Up North.
For over 10 years, the party has been an affirmation of the brand's character – relaxed, full of playfulness and creativity. The event strengthens the power of the photography community and regularly reminds about the fun side of the photo business.
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Brand Manual + assets
Every component of the visual identity system has been neatly organized, catalogued, and provided in a user-friendly database.
Additionally, helpful instructional materials were created, including video tutorials and a brand guide, which explain how to effectively use this system.
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Posted Dec 5, 2024
Brand offers outstanding photo albums to photographers only – so they can make them a natural part of their offer and grow their photo business.
