Zerofee. Good Thinking:

We’re believ­ers in the pos­i­tive impact of becom­ing ‘close’ to our clients – not in a sin­is­ter, stalk­ing man­ner – but in the sense of devel­op­ing per­sonal con­cern for their well–being as an organ­i­sa­tion or busi­ness. It’s one thing to care about the suc­cess of your work for them, but more impor­tant to be able to care about how well they per­form. Hav­ing a gen­uine invest­ment of that kind is reflected in the cre­ative work you deliver for your client as a designer. It helps if the client in ques­tion does good work for good causes, of course.

Zero­fee has been work­ing with TRAID in var­i­ous guises since their incep­tion ten years ago. They’ve flown by, because we’ve always had fun with them. Some­thing we’ve been long­ing to tackle for a num­ber of years is a ‘refur­bish­ment’ of their iden­tity; the orig­i­nal had been very pop­u­lar but, after a decade, was look­ing tired and in need of an over­haul. Retain­ing the cen­tral idea, visual lan­guage and well-recognised colour palette (with a sub­tle tweak to address some pre­vi­ous CMYK weak­ness) were fun­da­men­tal require­ments and the result sees its first major out­ing in the launch of TRAID’s new Cam­den shop – appro­pri­ately, their tenth in their tenth birth­day year.

We think the new iden­tity retains all the pos­i­tive char­ac­ter­is­tics of the orig­i­nal while visu­ally sim­pli­fy­ing, strength­en­ing and mod­ernising it for another decade. It’s been a fan­tas­tic chal­lenge to imple­ment the new iden­tity in this retail envi­ron­ment; pro­ject­ing signs, win­dow dis­plays, swing tags, posters and mass of other less vis­i­ble, but no less impor­tant man­i­fes­ta­tions. We’re look­ing for­ward to see­ing it put into effect at other loca­tions soon and, by all accounts, the Cam­den shop is already doing well.

Zero­fee is also involved in an ongo­ing pro­gramme of work that sees the iden­tity roll out across a range of require­ments (includ­ing a suite of mate­ri­als for TRAID’s edu­ca­tional pro­gram) that test its flex­i­bil­ity and, with­out any hes­i­ta­tion, we can say we’re enjoy­ing every minute of it. We’re really proud to be asso­ci­ated with a group of peo­ple who have been at the fore­front of an effort to raise the pro­file of the envi­ron­men­tal and social impact of the fash­ion indus­try and have worked incred­i­bly hard to give Lon­don (and Brighton) an oppor­tu­nity to shop sus­tain­ably and look incred­i­ble. Our rela­tion­ship with TRAID is a per­fect exam­ple of what we love to do – chal­leng­ing, pro­gres­sive and eth­i­cally sound work for an organ­i­sa­tion that we feel close to and makes us feel like we’re part of their team.

The pho­tos in this post are shot by the won­der­ful Car­o­line Pur­day (except where indi­cated) and the TRAID Cam­den shop archi­tec­tural design was under­taken by Burogloo, with sig­nage and vinyl work pro­duced by AJ Dar­ling & Sons.