hei, business strategy and design
Founded in 2019, hei is a one-person business that offers healthy, bio and home-made products in a small city in Cuenca, Ecuador. I had the chance to guide my client through the whole process, from the strategy to de design and implementation of the business.
At the beginning of this project, I had a long talk with my client to be able to identify her needs, her personality, the style where she feels identify with. She told me she wanted to position "hei" as a trustworthy, healthy, modern home-made product brand. So based on that, I chose the material, color palette and design the style of the brand.
When I design a logo I like to start with a pencil and paper to be able to try some organic shapes. After I've got some ideas, I translate them into a digital sketch in Adobe Illustrator to see how good they work, how readable they are and which look the best in some applications. Once the logo and branding are done, I apply the style to a website using programs like Figma, Sketch or Adobe XD.
My client was very happy about the end result because she could start her business with a good response from the people. She is already selling her product in small fairs of the city and through the social networks.
I believe a brand should be always holistic, which means, that the composition between image, applications, publicity, service and all the client touchpoints should communicate always the same message. In small businesses like this one-person product brand, the investment in publicity at the beginning won't be very high, so I tried that all the templates I designed for the Instagram grid are easily replaceable so my client can change them independent of me or any other designer. In the future, this might change, but I think it is very important to think about how or client will manage their own image because I have seen a lot of cases where we designers make everything nice and correct, but later on, the client doesn't have any guidelines and if they don't as for support, the image will be disorganized and the brand won't look nice anymore, so I always suggest to make templates for them or even to train a bit the client if they have a small business.
