Finding heritage in a New York knitwear label.
525 America has been creating high quality, contemporary women’s knitwear since 1983. With roots in Brooklyn, they have a rich history anchored to 7th Avenue. 525 America has been working with Unified Theory to revive and refresh the brand to better reflect the company heritage in a modern age.
Through brand workshops with the senior stakeholders we helped define the brand story, their goals for the new brand, and identified and researched the competition through perceptual mapping of brands in the same space. By defining a common language that the client could use to describe the brand, including who the company was, what they do and why they do it, we honed in on characteristics and attributes around the brand. This served as our north star, informing all brand work going forward.
The demographic of 525 America skews to an older audience, and our challenge was to a design a contemporary brand that would not only live within the competitive landscape, but also appeal to a younger audience while still retaining interest from their core customers. The result is a minimal, custom-crafted typographic mark that reflects an established, trusted brand.
We created a flexible grid system to be used across all marketing materials, with logotype lock-ups specific to the application. Looking to the history of New York itself for typographic inspiration, we pulled references from vintage billboards, street signs and store-fronts. We paired our newly-crafted mark with the classic Trade Gothic typeface, contrasting with the wider logotype letterforms. To round out the brand work for 525 America, the new brand was applied to a new eCommerce website.
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Unified Theory
- Design