6 Guaranteed Tips For Building A Brand With Prints & Patterns
While we often dream of building our own brands, it takes more that grit and grind to create a brand that resonates organically with its customers and builds into a community. Having gone through a journey to explore ourselves, we think, what you are going to read next will guarantee you a better shot at your Brand goals(If not completely help you succeed) J and encourage you to explore your dreams in a planned manner.
1.Defining Your Aesthetic:
The first step to building a brand with surface patterns & prints is defining your aesthetic. This will help you determine the overall look and feel of your brand, as well as what types of patterns and prints will work best for your products.
Branding is the process of defining your brand through the use of patterns and prints. It can be done with a cumulative approach of forming a brand storytelling, having a distinct Visual identity, Graphic tonality, Surface patterns, Colors play an important role along with other forms that have some commonality with your brand.
How you define your brand handwriting and graphic language will depend on what you are trying to sell and what product it is. For example, if you are selling merchandise, then a brand that has a consistent look and feel would work well. If you want to sell artisanal goods, then a variety of pattern and print designs would be more appropriate. This is one reason why there are so many different styles of patterns & prints out there: stylistic differences make differentiation between products easier.
Before you can develop your own aesthetic style, though, you should think through all the options available. For example you can check out pixemix.com.( a marketplace for pattern and print as well as other creative digital assets), to explore trend forecasted prints & patterns in various themes well before the seasonal arrives. The prints are trans-seasonal and crafted for effortless brand launches and merchandise.
- Developing a Signature Style: Once you have defined your aesthetic, it's time to start developing a signature style. This should be a unique combination of patterns and prints that reflects your brand's personality and sets you apart from the competition.
A Brand's Visual identity is a term that can mean many different things depending on who you ask. If you are an established entity, then you are probably more familiar with the “visual identity” aspect of branding.
If you are a start-up, then you might be more familiar with the “company” aspect of visual identity. You may also know that your brand is what your customers/customers think about you, so it's important to make sure that it is a strong & unique one. You should also make sure that your brand isn't just good-looking but has a distinct look and useful to people to associate with.
Aesthetics, however, is something that start-ups have to work much harder on than established companies do.
- Launching & Sustaining with a lean team.
One of the biggest follies brands do is go overboard with hiring talent without proper planning. So we aren’t saying NO! But while it might at times work for big companies.. its a recurring challenge with having a big team on board….We all know we don’t want overheads mounting in balance sheets, sub-standard design output, team management issues, infrastructure setup costs and many more challenges in a companies journey. So collaborating with agencies comes handy and goes a long way. It helps with professional brand crafters who come with collective intelligence to create your brand Vision from scratch. Right from concept to launch. So stay LEAN!
- Creating Memorable Designs: Once you have developed your signature style, it's time to start creating memorable designs. This means incorporating your patterns and prints into product designs that are both eye-catching and practical and carry a signature.
Your pattern and print should be easily recognizable, even when they are used in small doses. Think about how you can use your designs to add a pop of color or personality to an otherwise mundane product. Incorporating your brand into everyday items is a great way to keep your name top of mind. And who knows, maybe your design will become so iconic that it ends up on a trend forecasting Agency! This is why it's important to have a strong and easily recognizable graphic tone of your brand.
What makes your brand unique? What separates you from your competitors? What are your core values? These are all questions that need to be answered before you can start thinking about your brand. They are also questions that can be answered with some simple tools that help designers and developers alike identify what makes their brands so memorable – and why it matters. for example https://www.trendhunter.com is a melting pot for design & creative inspiration.
- Building a Cohesive Collection: As you continue designing new products, it's important to ensure that all of your designs work together cohesively. This creates a strong visual identity for your brand and makes it easy for customers to recognize your products.
The best way to create a cohesive collection is to use patterns and prints that can be applied to any product. There are different ways of doing this, but the most effective is to use thematic patterns or prints that you can reuse across your products. They need to be have a consistent & differentiated handwriting that your brand should stand for. A great example is Off White brand which has a unique graphic language that its customers resonate with.
- Promoting Your Brand: After you have built up a cohesive collection of products, it's time to start promoting your brand. This can be done through online marketing, social media, traditional advertising, or any other channels that reach your target market.
If you want to create a brand for your product, you need to be sure that it is well-designed and easy to understand, connects and value adds to your customers lifestyle and resonates with them. Start with print and pattern that you think your customers would love, it should also clearly communicate the brand story and point of view that you want to keep building around for times to come. The next step is to create a "brand persona" (a character who represents the company), make sure he/she knows how the company works, and provide him/her with a way of communicating with customers.
The more you can do for your brand, the more potential customers you will reach.
It’s important that you understand what your target market wants. You can analyse people’s purchase history, find out what they like or don’t like about your brand and use this information to refine your marketing messages. On the other hand, if what you have tried doesn’t work, you should start over again by asking yourself:
- What could I be doing better?
- What could I be doing differently?
- What could I do different? For example, if it turns out that people aren't interested in some of those products you offer but they are interested in others, then put all those features into one place so that people can choose between them. If all else fails, ask yourself:
- Who do I want my customers to be? Not everyone will buy everything on their shopping list, so make sure it's interesting enough for them not just for one type of customer but for everyone. If it works for me and my customers then great! But if not…let's try something new!
- Connecting with Your Customers:
The final step in building a successful brand with surface patterns & prints is connecting with your customers. This requires creating strong relationships with those who purchase your products and ensuring that they are always satisfied with their purchase
This article covers the topic of “connecting with your customers”. It is a fundamental step in building a successful brand with surface patterns & prints, and it should be considered as such from the outset. The good thing about this is that you don’t have to do it all at once, but you can break down some of your work into stages and work towards connecting with your customers in each stage.
We are also sharing a design processes for different types of brands use, read it here .
#A: Design Process for Product Design:
The best way to get started is to start by designing a product that solves a problem and that solves it well. This gives you some idea of what your product will look like and lets you understand how its features will interact with other products in the market. A good way to do this would be to build a prototype and test it in real life before going through the rest of the process.
#B: Design Process for Product Development:
Once you have an idea on what kind of features your product should have, start prototyping them using both paper prototypes and physical prototype. If you don’t have physical prototypes yet, get some! You can also use virtual prototypes like Procreate or other designing software’s; these are great because they let you see the whole product from several angles (and give designers the ability to get feedback from real users). While working on developing your prototype or making physical prototypes samples, stay focused on solving problems people are going to face in their daily lives (i.e., not on making them comfortable or leaving space for others). And remember: test first!
#C: Design Process for Product Launch:
Once you finish developing products, go through each phase again until all requirements are completed. When working on designing a new version of your product, try to keep things simple and make sure that everything works well, especially when launching a new design into production. This may not be easy because sometimes vendors will be able to “manipulate” their way out by creating too many changes while trying to keep everything compatible with previous versions — anything could happen! However, remember that having different versions helps immensely when testing out new features.
So here we are! With a clear plan and approach from a customer focused mindset. Bring together unique and compelling design language with unique and differentiated prints & patterns that compliment your products and its sure to win hearts.
