Rustler Hat Co. has taken the downtown Nashville shopping experience by storm. They are a premier custom hat experience that gives you a chance to reflect your personality while also keeping a unique Nashville keepsake. With no two hats alike, customers are able to pick a style, watch as the brim is customized, and pick out accessories like iron branding and bands.
We created their signature branding as well as some fun new branding images for their brick + mortar. Honor loved getting to be a part of giving the people of Nashville a unique and intentional creative experience. Let’s dive into their story.
THE DESIGN PROCESS:
A brand is not just a logo. It is an emotional connection with your audience. It represents the values, services, ideas, and personality of your company.
To first start telling your brand story, we have our clients pick brand words. You may ask, what are brand words? Imagine if your personal life and professional strengths intersected. This is the place from which a unique brand story can be told. During our discovery process with Rustler, we discovered these brand words with them:
Timeless
Luxury
Rugged
Exclusive
Elevated
As brand words, brand messages, and brand purpose is created, we dive into visuals and color.
A comprehensive color palette should support your brand message. The client mentioned this color inspiration during our discovery process: “Masculine, saddle leather brown. Weathered aged oak.” Now we are starting to put some pieces together. We were starting to see an outlaw theme mixed with western luxe. The team started getting excited about a “Gritty foundation with a superior rich feel.”
As our discovery deepened and visual inspiration took place, we started one of our favorite parts of the process: Mood Boards. Mood boards capture the essence of a brand. We use these to launch our creative brainstorming to really get a feel of what we want to create. Images that collectively give an overall vibe or feeling helps us understand the type of emotion we want to help portray with branding.
HANDS ON:
With the pieces coming together, we whip out our apple pencils, our program tools, and sometimes, good old pencil and paper.
Our main focus was typography. Serif fonts are known for showing luxury (think Prada), grandeur, strength, and tradition. Script conveys creativity and gives a personable feel. We liked the grittiness of the script with that rich feeling of a serif.
Adding and customizing these two together, we started to create an engaging contrast that conveys the brand: Unique and Strong.
FINAL CONCEPT:
After final touches were added, Rustler Hat Co. came to life and was ready to tell their brand story to Nashville.
THE BRAND COMING TO LIFE:
We had the honor to tell even more of Rustler’s story with photography. The style of photography including lighting, hues, background subject matter, and environment needs to make sense and be cohesive to set the tone.
With their brand new brick + mortar, designed by April Tomlin Interiors, we got to show off the beautiful and stylized interiors. We wanted to show luxury, ruggedness, and a personable experience, while also setting the stage for showing customers what their brand physically does.
The Honor team even got to visit and take part in the hat experience.
Rustler Hat Co.’s branding story is a great one, and one of our team’s favorites. Want to see more? Watch our Rustler reel here to see the process of the team’s new accessories. Check back soon for more branding journeys of our clients.
XO, The Honor Team
