An artful, type-focused identity for a production house

Lock Studios

Our brand approach elevates the original brand using minimal elements, situating it within the universe of luxury fashion. The new identity is type-led and thoughtfully pared-back and facilitates functionality between the two key services, fostering collaboration and upselling opportunities.

Focusing on editorial type lockups that continually get used throughout the system— these lockups serve as distinctive, branded stamps unique to Lock Studios and were conceptualised to be reminiscent of luxury printed address stamps, and old letterheads. 

Location lockups were crafted as logos for each location embodying a unique identity while maintaining unification. Playing on the concept of ‘lockup’ — the Lock logo in its stacked secondary form directs the continued visual language for each location logo under the same umbrella. These contrast against the more structured nature of type seen within the brand identity.

Our restructuring and strategy for Lock Studio’s website highlights a mirroring between their two offerings, with UX decisions to split the website, almost like two doors into the same framework, while offering universal methods to toggle between the two at all times. 

Embracing the essence of its name, the Lock logo transforms through animation ‘locking’ into place and creating an anchorage point for the brand experience.

Brand identity for a modular, material-centric menswear brand

Taking inspiration from the modular approach of clothing that is so innate to Lestrange, we applied this as a fundamental in our design thinking. Our brand identity focuses on anchoring design elements such as ‘material swatches’, to give homage, to educate, and to make more obvious the brand’s purpose: in owning less pieces, and making them do more, at a higher quality. 

As an essential building block of the brand identity, our ‘material swatches’ root our modular approach, and serve as interactive entry-points to discover new pieces within the Lestrange range as well as understanding existing pieces you own and their care. 

Material swatches serve as content opportunities, enabling the brand to showcase backend production processes and integrate impact-driven, environmentally textured photography. This allows for a more expansive and conceptually rich art direction.

Holistically, we prioritized creating an immediate consumer-friendly first impression and a quick understanding of Lestrange’s niche, quality, and price point. Our brand approach strikes a balance between fashion and lifestyle; refined but accessible. 

Elements like ‘baste stitching’ icons, originating from our new logomark, extend seamlessly to icon sets and UI in digital applications continually conveying the concept of -less and +more.

Our material swatches play a key role in shaping the SKU organization and sitemap restructuring for Lestrange's new website, offering a focused strategy for content and product catalog management.

With a complete redesign and restructing of Lestrange's website, this included a new art direction for ecommerce photography, showcasing pieces as fashion-forward and refined. Seamless integration of video content added 'windows of surprise' within clean and static imagery, providing consumers a deeper understanding of fabric movement, fit, and intricate details.

The concept of modularity here is expressed through a sequential direction where a string of ecommerce images can be placed next to one another and give an impression of frame by frame movement and walking.

In restructuring the sitemap architecture, we prioritized a material-centric approach for each product, in line with Lestrange's commitment to quality and impact. Our efforts included implementing a clean tagging strategy, simplifying nomenclature, and establishing parent products.

SKUs are organized throughout the website by two attributes: Style (Cut) and Material type. With limited seasonal launches and an unconventional product cycle, our user experience and content organization strategy was key to ensure freshness, newness and discovery while having clear and concise pathways.

We maintain an ongoing collaboration with Lestrange, conducting varied campaign launches to stress-test the parent Art Direction and pillars established in the new brand identity. 

Our modular focus extends to the creation of a larger Art Direction framework, allowing unique launches and campaigns to coexist within the same ecosystem. We integrated sub-categories of art direction, considering elements like Science, Sustainability/Nature, Sports, Lifestyle and more.

A campaign expressing MUJI’s ‘quality of life’ philosophy and creating deeper US resonance.

The MUJI Quality of Life campaign approach aims to highlight the importance of simplicity, functionality, and sustainability in enhancing overall quality of life. Inspiring individuals to embrace a minimalist lifestyle, cultivate mindfulness, and nurture a harmonious home environment that promotes well-being. 

The campaign direction recognizes cultural nuances and tailors the Japanese-inspired lifestyle to resonate deeper with an American audience.

Aiming to foster a deeper resonance with the US market, we anchored our creative direction in a sense of realism that showcases Back to School as a spirited, exciting and somewhat chaotic period. 

The campaign features a sense of togetherness, and the enjoyment of space communally demonstrating the varied approaches to minimalism and mindfulness. 

We managed multiple aspects of production including location scouting and selection, casting, set design, team curation, post-production and continued to work together on the activation efforts for the campaign in social strategy and design.

Eastern Rodeo is an all-rounded creative studio offering best-in-class services across strategy, branding, creative direction, design & build.

Capturing the convergence of beauty and technology, the root of our brand approach employs a generative, structured circular grid in which expressive and organic shapes resembling nail polish swatches, are created within. The ability to constantly create new, unique shapes, conveys a sense of expression and play within the bounds of a systematic, tech-based framework.

Generated swatch shapes mirror the intricate process of Clockwork technology—where nails are scanned and nail polish is mapped to each finger.

The limitless shape and colour combinations provide a framework for the identity, allowing it to extend to all types of design applications for the brand.

Application layouts follow the structure of the generative grid, using modules that fit together like building blocks. These layout rules serve to frame our generated swatches as the anchoring piece in each design.

To further the tech-beauty focus of the brand, we integrated the use of colour names as digital colour hexcodes. Employing an understood digital convention in this way further draws the comparison of digital vs. print and real life, perpetuating the analogy of technology.

Our 3D swatches provide a feeling of tactility and glossiness within the world of beauty, translating digital swatches into tactile moments. Moments of animation help convey the instructional, progress and kinetic nature of the product. 

The website and product direction adopts on the generative grid structure in its design approach, focusing on animated moments to tease the in-person experience.

Aligning with the broader mission of Lestrange—to extend life and continuously care for your clothing, to “do more, with less”, we profiled, interviewed and captured portraits of notable '24 Trousers' wearers in their own pair.

Our launch campaign celebrates and normalizes the expected 'wear and tear' of clothing, highlighting the vibrant lives each garment has lived and promoting the potential for continued circularity and life with Re_Fresh.

Pairing these portraits with more scientific, before & after, technology-focused imagery, we curated coloured and themed series of product & profile together.

Shot in a local laundromat in London, video content was also produced to play on the circular, life cycle of a garment by depicting the ‘going backwards in time’ in a washing machine.  

Eastern Rodeo led production for these video and photoshoots, including all sourcing, timelines, casting, set design, budgeting, ensuring a creatively-sound cost distribution and maintaining alignment of creative direction.

The birth of Cabi came from a simple market understanding: a gap in the market for easy-to-use, easy to understand high quality Japanese products that uphold traditional techniques while bridging the understanding gap faced with existing complex specialty products. 

Finding harmony between approachability and the upholding of traditional techniques, the brand identity of Cabi has been designed to feel that nothing is out of reach. Our brand approach is a confident blend of these notions, focusing on the personification of these core flavors and ingredients spotlighting product quality & ease-of-use.

The Cabi original trio, features distinct playful characters representing each product type. The brand identity carries a big load in this way, in ensuring quick understanding and recognition of product use and type within a saturated, CPG market.

Messaging forms an important piece of Cabi. Not only in the brand voice, but in writing for education. The complexity of the Japanese food market can be daunting for non-Japanese speakers, and our aim was to streamline product communication. Messaging for Cabi leads with product-first, supported by the brand voice. Communicating in punchy ways, we create familiar comparisons with easy to understand tastes and examples.  

The packaging of the Cabi trio plays on traditional and familiar tropes of Japanese and Asian packaged goods with a simple red bottle cap, washi paper and custom labels personifying key ingredients and product types. We worked with Japan based suppliers to manage production and manufacturing of these pieces. 

Special editions feature traditionally-anchored packaging types such as furoshiki wraps.  The brand identity also flexes to accommodate new packaging styles and launches within the Cabi brand as seen with our the Soy Sauce Tasting Palette, a more premium product of Cabi.

Photography is an area of Cabi that we take great pleasure in, enabling us to collaborate with photographers we admire to form unique visions for launches, events and content series.

Photography for the Cabi brand is also done internally, in-house, by Eastern Rodeo approaching a range of photography styles and production setups. This allows content creation to be fluid, and hands on, allowing the portrayal of the backend process/methods of products to further storytelling.

The Cabi ecomm experience is streamlined and simple focusing on communicating the feeling of tactility in the kitchen. Featuring a systematic appearance of rounded edges made to be reminiscent of recipe cards and kitchen notes, this blends cohesively with the Cabi recipe index, a large portion of the website housing Cabi specific recipes which can be saved. 

In addition to ongoing marketing efforts, event production is a large part of the community-driven initiative of Cabi in effort to shed light and education on Japanese home cooking and ingredients. Some of our recent events include: a 2 part soy-sauce making and fermentation workshop with the Ace Hotel and a camping & cooking weekend away with Snowpeak. 

Full Sleep: A personalized sleep program utilizing the best of non-wearable hardware and software 

Our collaboration with Full Sleep involved developing a creative and messaging strategy to position them effectively in a tech-saturated market. We conducted extensive research, including stakeholder interviews, brand audits, user interviews, psychographic research, and competitive analysis, resulting in a consolidated creative strategy, positioning, and product communication approach. Working closely with Full Sleep during this pivotal stage allowed us to seamlessly integrate and represent the strategy in their brand identity.

Our brand identity, inspired by the promise "Live fuller days with restful nights," focuses visually on the 'day,' a departure from the common night-centric approach in the sleep industry. 

The intentional singularity and simplicity of the brand identity create a clutter-free experience, catering to accessibility needs, especially for an older demographic.

The use of one font throughout the system, and the logomark being set in the same manner emphasizes our decluttered approach to branding as well as sets the tone for a ‘program’ vs. a static brand application. 

We maintain a singular approach in our colour palette, opting for a bright, authoritative blue associated with the 'day'. Supplementary gradient swatches represent different times of the day, enhancing time understanding throughout the experience.

Extending this to our content and art direction, we highlight calming and scientific images, typically close-up, intentionally cropped compositions of nuanced moments. This ensures easy continuity of execution for Full Sleep internally to maintain the integrity of the look and feel.

Animation is a core element to the new brand identity, providing a guiding and friendly tone within the digital product, and to intentionally offset the more scientific simplicity of other brand elements.

Adopting a design-led utilitarian approach to information display, our brand identity fluidly adapts to be applied to the digital platform, prioritizing universal design, clarity and ease of use. 

Celebrating the richness and variety of culture, frequency, and sound, our brand identity places this diversity at the forefront within a shared space and platform. It presents a bold and diverse system constructed from multiple, seemingly different stylistic parts coming together as a toolkit. 

The identity concept is akin to the layering of stickers, creating something entirely different as each applied instance takes on its own life and form. This high energy is maintained throughout the brand identity and production, successfully executed through the constant layering of vibrant elements in the toolkit. 

Intentionally ensuring the toolkit was easy to break down into its individual elements for individual use was crucial. This consideration was key for content creation and the ongoing life of the identity beyond the curated applications of the event itself.

Leveraging 3D and animation provides ample textural opportunities within the brand system. The brand logo is blown up and layered throughout applications as a pattern. Subtle looped frequency animation draws attention to content, and we created various animated templates to align our content with a social-first direction.

We developed digital templates, including social and reel templates, to facilitate easy video editing for our partners and artists. Before the event, we provided instructional guides for templates and content guidelines, enabling external members to create their own content utilising the ‘layering’ approach as directed by our toolkit. This approach contributed to maximising content, effectively spreading the message of the event and reaching full event capacity.

The 1-800-D2C product approach was focused on creating a fully circular duality between the discovery of new brands, and the discovery of tools. Each linking to one another throughout the entire ecosystem, in the most simplified manner, aiding constant discovery. 

Perpetuating the brand and tool duality throughout the product, our brand identity was inspired the duality of old and new, in bringing the text-heavy, nostalgic paper-based ‘yellow pages’ to life in a modern way. Staying true to this essence, we crafted a easy to digest digital classifieds. A nod to this, too, is in the name. 

As 1-800-D2C grew, we adapted and added to our product approach to flex to the growing demands of the audience and the business model. This way of involvement allowed us to move quickly and iterate with new insights the platform was constantly revealing.

Finding product solutions that allowed for monetary opportunity, we constantly worked to optimize the product over the course of these 2 years implementing the following but not limited to: content strategy, paid media strategy, and feature sets: such as “friends rates”, consultations, job boards, “show up first”, tool reviews, tagging strategy etc. 

Managing the product through a very iterative build process, the systematic nature of the product and the maintenance of it was an important. We were hyper-conscious of new implementations staying true to the product system and existing modules.

Working throughout this project from conception in 2021, and through its many product updates and iterations to prep for acquisition. 1-800-D2C was successfully acquired in 2023. 

Defining the meaning of Strength for Women in Japan

Eastern Rodeo is an all-rounded creative studio in New York & Asia. 

Eastern Rodeo is an all-rounded creative studio offering best-in-class services across strategy, branding, creative direction, design & build.

3D & Animation

Website Design

Brand Identity

Creative Strategy

Development

Print & Packaging

Product Approach

Art Direction

Production