James & Ella

A happiness and wellbeing company for dogs
ella.co

Before the rebrand

James Middleton, a well-known public figure and advocate for the importance of dogs on mental health, decided to develop a wellbeing company for dogs.

The first step being to tackle nutrition, he discovered that although feeding raw was best diet choice for his dogs. But raw feeding is messy, time-consuming to prepare and makes holidaying with your four-legged friends not much of a holiday at all. So, he developed a raw freeze-dried food range.

My role

I joined Ella & Co as they were expanding their product range, and we decided to take the opportunity to do a total rebrand at the same time. My work included designing a new visual identity, design system, and the full design of the website.

A photographer, Natale Towell, was brought onboard to produce fresh product & ingredient images, which I art directed. We also brought on a second photographer, Matt Ankers, to produce a bank of lifestyle photography and video.

In true startup fashion, the brand has evolved a few times over the 3-4 years I have worked with James, and the latest iteration included a name change to James & Ella, along with an entire retail product packaging range - which recently won Best In Class in the Non-Food Brand Extension category at the PAC Global Awards in Manhattan!

I worked on

Brand Identity
Art Direction
Packaging (for retail)
UX/UI
Merchandise
Paid Social
Investor Decks

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The design system

The logo

We arched the wordmark to reference a farmstyle aesthetic - a nod to James’ countryside lifestyle.

Colours & typography

A deeper primary blue and secondary neutral have replaced the brighter tones of the previous identity. A contrast between the title and body copy is created by balancing a ornate serif title typeface with a more contemporary and clean body copy typeface.

Photography

The brand imagery has deeper, richer tones now, and is intended to document James’ life with his dogs in a very honest way. Lifestyle imagery is captured in a reportage style, is never posed, and tells the story of the bond between James and his dogs. Our product shots are approached as human food still-lifes with beautiful lighting and soft shadows. Individual ingredients are photographed as small chunks in an artistic manner to create consistency across quite a range of different meats, fruits, vegetables and herbs.