Auspicious Baking Co. Label Designs
I doubt there's anyone in Savannah, GA who hasn't heard of Auspicious Baking Co. And rightly so! It's been such a pleasure to watch their success and growth over the last few years. So, when Mark and Katie, owners of Auspicious, asked me to help them enhance their branding, I was over the moon!
The year was 2017. A new bakery had just opened across the street from our neighborhood. "Auspicious Baking Company. I wonder what that is." I mused out loud as my now-husband and I, heading out for a weekend adventure, drove by and noticed the new business for the first time. "They look open. Let's go see," my husband responded. We opened the door and entered a tiny retail space featuring a large display case filled with loaves of bread and different variations of croissant-based pastries. We ended up sharing an everything croissant, modeled after an everything bagel, including the cream cheese in the middle. We quickly learned our mistake in sharing only one croissant. It was one of the best things either of us had ever eaten! Our weekend breakfast routine would never be the same again.
Fast forward to now, four years later, and I doubt there's anyone in Savannah who hasn't heard of Auspicious Baking Co. And rightly so! It's been such a pleasure to watch their success and growth over the last few years. So, when Mark and Katie, owners of Auspicious, asked me to help them enhance their branding, I was over the moon! Like many small business owners, Mark and Katie did nearly everything themselves to get up and running, including creating their product labels. Now that their business had grown, they were ready for an upgrade.
It's easy to gather inspiration for a client like Auspicious. 5-10 minutes spent scrolling through their Instagram feed is enough to make your mouth water & your stomach yearn. There's so much beauty and texture in the baked goods that they create. The challenge for me was determining how to bring some of that texture and charm to their labels.
I spent some time pouring over the images I had saved from Auspicious's Instagram feed. They were all beautiful and unique, but they also shared a common motif. It was hard to put my finger on it at first, but then it hit me. There was one phrase that perfectly described all of the baked goods I had been leaning on for inspiration: refined but rustic. They all had a perfectly imperfect quality I wanted to tap into and bring out in Auspicious's branding. Now that I had determined some design parameters, it was time to get to work.
I decided to tackle the refined but rustic design challenge by combining loose, hand-drawn elements and rough edges with clean, smooth lines. Using the images I had gathered as inspiration, I created a background illustration of flowers, seeds, and leafy greens. Because design is a visual language, I've broken down some of my design decisions for you with imagery instead of drolling on paragraph after paragraph.
Once the design was finalized, we had one last obstacle to overcome before these labels made their way into the world: color matching and print quality. Mark and Katie wanted to continue printing their labels in-house, so there was a lot of testing and adjusting to make sure everything came out just right. After a couple of weeks of fine-tuning, the final result is a beautiful and cohesive set of labels that the team at Auspicious can update themselves as needed. I hope you all love the new look as much as we do!
