Carnilove Brand System

Carnilove’s positioning gives it a clear territory in a crowded category. Pet food tends to reach for ingredients, rustic textures and wilderness imagery. Carnilove is more interested in the animal behind the pet. Its customers may live in cities, but their instincts remain wild.

That tension lets the brand be both urban and elemental, sophisticated and raw. We developed the strategy into a fuller framework around a Maverick archetype: not different for its own sake, but confident enough to go its own way.

From DesignBridge, we inherited a fantastic custom typeface, with sharp cuts and irregular details that make the letterforms look almost clawed into shape. Around it we built a wider typographic system, adding complementary typefaces and refining an expressive treatment based on the 13-degree angle of the logo. Raw, energetic and deliberately unruly, it became one of the most recognisable elements of the brand.

A custom-built typography generator lets Carnilove’s teams create the expressive treatment themselves. What once required an experienced designer working in Illustrator becomes a matter of typing, adjusting and exporting.

Carnilove’s website is first and foremost an ecommerce flagship, but it has to do more than sell. We designed a shopping experience that could handle the practical work of choosing and buying products while also giving the brand room to unfold: its positioning, ingredients, point of view and distinctive visual world.

The demands of the site, in turn, helped sharpen the identity itself, expanding its visual language and clarifying how it should adapt across content, formats and screens.

Behind the ecommerce experience sits a robust digital design system. Built on atomic design principles, it spans from the smallest UI elements through to complete pages.

Buttons, cards, grids and larger components were designed as parts of the same system, so each level could adapt to different content and screens without losing the brand’s distinctive character.

A consumer brand like Carnilove has to live in an extraordinary number of places, so we built a grid system versatile enough to handle everything from conventional layouts to extreme horizontal and vertical compositions, while also defining how the logo scales, aligns and sits alongside partner brands.

Working so closely with Carnilove over 18 months meant we could refine it across the full range of the brand’s applications, from websites and social media to packaging, print, retail and events.

We supported Carinlove’s go-to-market efforts with a strategy and series of campaigns spanning outdoor, digital CLV screens, and social media, adapting the system to each format without losing the character of the brand.

Carnilove came with a limited set of ingredient icons, originally created for the packaging. We expanded these into a broader library, then created a complete set of UI icons for the ecommerce site, using the same distinctive cuts and irregularities to keep everything within the same visual language.

A brand that regularly airs ads on prime-time TV in dozens of countries and runs active social media campaigns needs reusable motion templates that work across languages and formats. So we built a system of end cards and other video layers that can be used in any of Carnilove’s 80+ markets.

Using our system for color, typography and composition, the Carnilove team developed a custom merch line of apparel and accessories for both pets and their owners.

A good brand system makes a brand consistent, a great one makes it reproducible. For Carnilove, we built a living digital guide that brings together rules, assets and tools such as the typography generator in one place. Unlike a static PDF, it can evolve with the brand, giving independent teams across markets a shared reference as new needs and applications emerge.

Carnilove introduced the new brand to more than 100 international partners at a dedicated launch event. We developed the strategy and creative for the event, from the presentations and visuals to the story used to explain what was changing and why. It gave the people responsible for taking the brand into market a shared understanding of where it was going.