Seals
Brand Audit & Refresh, Social Media Collateral
🏊♂️ Swimming earplugs | 🌊 Ocean conservation
3 to 4 weeks
The Challenge
Kate Parsons, founder of Seals, was looking to build and launch her new product, Seals - an environmentally sustainable and charitable option to reusable swimming earplugs. Recently winning the UNSW Founder’s New Wave showcase, she had the momentum to begin setting up her project for launch. To distinguish the brand in the space and showcase its fun, vibrant culture, like the personality of its founder, Kate wanted a brand refresh that would help prepare her brand launch in the right direction, creating the next cult following in the form of swimming earplugs.
The Solution
Key Features & Highlights
How can brands such as sustainable swimming earplugs be designed to create a cult following and establish themselves in a niche but saturated market?
The Approach
With Seals’ unique feature as not only being made out of sustainable materials but to give 50% of its profit to local marine conservation projects, Seals is not only targeting cool Australian ocean swimmers, but also their passion to protect the ocean they swim in.
Similar to the work of a restoration artist, my role as a designer is not strip the original brand’s idea, which was well-aligned to the founder’s values, but to assess and identify what should be preserved and refine it to illustrate the true value of Seals as a brand and a cult identity.
Through analysing and preserving all the successful elements of Seals’ branding and the ways to elevate these features to make them accessible and scalable for production while providing the sensation of bliss and freedom, Seals became a representation of the Australian beachgoer who cares not only for their health, but also for the health of the ocean they swim in.
Starting with a high-level review of the brand’s values, target audience and current assets in the provided brief, I identify the things that make Seals be Seals, and the things that can be improved to make Seals more like Seals.
Some things I loved and wanted to keep included:
The use of blue gradients to represent being underwater or in the ocean
The Seal illustration: the abstract details with a nod to Aboriginal art is a beautiful touch and representation of Australia’s nature.
The playful personality within the use of script fonts in the wordmark.
A big challenge for this image, however, is that the logo’s original file could not be retrieved by the founder, meaning we could only work with the PNG file for the time being.
Understanding the key elements that make Seals unique to preserve and to refine shaped my key design decisions on what needed to be changed.
The Outcome
The Reflection
Refreshing this branding kit utilising brand research and competitive analysis early on was the optimal choice to provide a comprehensive and balanced assessment to design a unique and powerful brand and help it to reach its full potential. It created and established the ideal brand vision to achieve the goals of the business and create a brand that deserves a cult following.
While having a tight scope and deadline, I would have loved to expand my deliverables, such as providing a more accessible and digital documentation of brand guidelines (through a Notion site or Canva file) that can be edited and refined over time as the business continues to scale.
