“When I met Cindy Gombert, principal of Lunabrand Design Group (www.lunabrands.com), we were actively looking to target new demographics that would allow us to significantly expand our market and drive new revenue,” says Eileen Spitalny, co-founder of Fairytale Brownies, Phoenix, AZ.
The challenge in doing so was that the high quality of the company’s namesake Fairytale Brownies and other products, such as coffee, and on-pack messaging didn’t match, consequently obscuring the brand message of a sumptuous, premium product.
People who were unfamiliar with the product tended to focus on “Brownie,” the brand’s on-pack animated character, and often weren’t familiar with an essential distinctive feature of Fairytale Brownies: The treats have a gooey chocolate, melt-in-your-mouth feel that adults remember from eating brownies during their childhood.
“The essential question we had to answer was how to keep the mythology of the Brownie character but also bring out the ‘premiumness’ of the chocolate,” Gombert says.
The answer was to create an array of designs on cartons supplied by Fleetwood-Fibre Packaging & Graphics (www.fleetwood-fibre.com) and foil pouches from Belmark (www.belmark.com). The cartons and pouches include an illustration of an enchanted forest for Brownie, who was restaged as a silhouette character. This approach allows Brownie to complement the rest of the package design. Elsewhere inside and outside the packaging, colorful “occasion” bands, cellophane, and four-color offset printing with a varnish coat project the perception of a high-end brand for the individually wrapped brownies inside each package.
Spitalny says the fairytale motif captures the sense of whimsy and generosity that she and her co-founder, David Kravetz, want to communicate about the brand. It provides inspiration for the company’s name, logo, and tagline, “A Taste of Pure Enchantment,” to appear on the packaging.
Distinctive typography also sells the brand message. Custom fonts evoke the rich and gooey Belgian chocolate “mouth feel” that Fairytale Brownies consumers prize.
