The brand is Equipt, and it is for the outdoors. Campers. Hikers. Hunters and fishermen. Families loading a vehicle at six in the morning to go somewhere with no signal. Anyone about to leave the pavement who would like to be ready for it.
I spent this year building it from nothing, and that is a rarer thing to get to do than people think. Most brand work is renovation. You inherit a logo, a colour nobody quite remembers choosing, and years of small compromises, and you do what you can with them. A blank page is a privilege, and it is also a little frightening, because everything that ends up on it is a decision you will have to stand behind.
What I kept returning to was the promise buried in the name. To be equipped is not to own the most gear. It is to have the right thing, ready, when the moment comes. That is a different feeling from abundance, and it wanted a different visual language. Not loud. Not tactical in the hard way outdoor brands sometimes reach for. Prepared. Calm. Sturdy.
Packaging is a discipline I have written about before and keep learning from. You have three seconds and one hand. There is no second screen, no follow-up email, nothing to tell you where someone hesitated. The thing either reaches out from the shelf or it does not.
It has been a good year to work on. There is something about designing for people going outside that pulls you back into the physical world, and I found I needed that more than I knew.