project overview
Megan is an experienced swim and lingerie designer who'd decided to take the leap and launch her own business, Willow & Wave, selling premium swim and resortwear. I was bought on board to bring her brand to life across a variety of touchpoints, translating the vision she had in her mind into real world designs. See below for a full run down of what I did...
MY ROLES
defining the brand
product offering • branding • competitors • target customer
tone of voice • photography style • graphic treatments • EvENTS
Before producing any visuals, I worked with Meg to solidify exactly what Willow & Wave was, who we were speaking to and who we wanted to attract. We worked through every aspect of the brand, from the products and branding to competitors, tone of voice and how she wanted to communicate with her audience.
We also explored the art direction for photoshoots and any inspiration she had found along the way for graphics. In turn, we established a clear visual direction and gave Megan a strong foundation to successfully launch her business.
creating the
visual identity
Founder Meg had already designed a logo and selected a rich, chocolate brown as the brand’s hero colour.
I turned this into a more considered visual identity by creating a stacked logo variant for greater flexibility, adding a complementary colour palette and typefaces. Together with the photoshoot Meg produced in India, these elements gave the brand the visual foundation it needed to come to life cohesively across digital and print touchpoints.
CRM emails
As with the rest of the brand output, I designed the emails to be very trend-lead for the ultimate 'cool girl'. I used retro elements such as polaroids and grain effects on the photography, leaning into the y2k movement and added 'social-first' elements such as the iphone camera roll, instagram 'like' icon etc.
Alongside this, I mixed in emails that felt cleaner with more of a typical grid like structure, to ensure the brand felt premium but playful - similar to the marketing style of Rhode or Gisou. Most of the emails below feature animations (like the mobile version shown here) or video such as looping video heroes, to showcase the products in motion.
Given the amount of texture and elements within the designs, I designed them in photoshop and built them out in shopify, setting up a flow so the designs could be utilised for a wider audience as new customers discover the brand and subscribe.
website design
old Shopify website
Meg had created a Shopify website design, but it needed some tweaks to ensure it retained that same premium feel and strong brand consistency as the rest of the creative output. I updated the colour palette throughout, changed the fonts and text sizes and altered some of the blocks such as the footer for a clean, more modern feel that performed better on desktop and mobile. Alongside this, I used Shopify's in-built AI to code a new newsletter sign up block that was more visually appealing than the text only version they offer. Finally, I edited together some of the clips from the Bali shoot, so mobile had an engaging homepage video hero.
new Shopify website (designed by me)
new website mobile (designed by me)
old PDP
new PDP (designed by me)
social stories
Meg has the skillset to confidently run her socials, so aside from helping with ideas and inspo for content, I produced designs to help pad out social stories - artworking what I'd done on emails to the correct sizes, adding logos and the collection name to suit paid ads and editing some of the photos, adding filters and effects and cropping to give them that same retro feel I'd done for email.
TESTIMONIAL
Simone completely elevated the branding for Willow & Wave.
I felt like I already had a really clear vision for my brand, but Sim opened my eyes to so many things I hadn’t even thought about and brought ideas I would never have considered myself.
Simone has such an incredible eye for detail and made everything feel cohesive, professional, creative and completely aligned with the vision I had in my head. Her work is so engaging and creative, and everything she creates is just so aesthetically beautiful. She really went above and beyond throughout the whole process.
I’m someone who likes to have complete control over my brand, so the fact that I trust Simone’s creative input completely says it all - I couldn’t recommend her enough.
Meg White
Founder of Willow & Wave
willow & wave
willow & wave