Down 2 Earth
Down 2 Earth (D2E) is an attainable luxury clothing brand that aims to curate climate-conscious, innovative garments that represent strides towards improvements in sustainable practices within the fashion industry. D2E offers products that empower individuals to express their own identities and provides a inclusive and diverse cultural space to promote a place of belonging. The clothing will be ethically and sustainably sourced, produced and distributed to protect a responsible top to bottom approach to significantly reduce the levels of greenhouse gas emissions and textile wastage leading to climate change.
D2E aims to target 18-29-year-olds, commonly referred to as Generation Z (Gen Z - born between 1997 and 2012) as within the luxury fashion market they ‘represent approximately $360 billion in purchasing power’ (Freeman and Niehm, 2024). That sheer scale of monetary value could be used to create major change for the climate through conscious purchasing decisions. Furthermore, this Gen Z has been targeted as the majority are considered digital natives and will interact with social media to find their next fashion purchase versus visiting a retail store to try-on (Archana and Shree, 2024). Whilst Muralidhar and Raja (2019) point out that Gen Z need trust to be built in order for the success of the digital marketing to take hold. Commonly, consumers will see the latest fashion trend worn by an influencer - coined by Freeman and Niehm (2024) ’celebrity worship’ - and complete the purchase due to their endorsement.
The brand started off as being called New Age. The anarchistic phrase was an early idea about creating an anti-establishment brand, however I felt it related more to a music genre than a clothing label. When I knew I wanted it to be more focused on sustainability, I was using world-play on earth, planet, nature to keep the name related to those themes. Additionally, most of the competitors in the fashion space do not have the product they sell in the name. Down 2 Earth came to mind from the down-to-earth phrase which I felt was relatable and colloquial enough for people to remember. I replaced the earlier name with this and preferred the layout of the three parts to the name.
I went back to basics and started sketching out various letter types. Because the brand is aimed towards the youthful side of culture and is authentic in vision, the typefaces needed to match. Out of these four, the bottom option (see right sketch) felt apt to move forward with to test out. At first I spaced out the name. At this point, the 2 in the centre appeared more like a ‘Z’. Therefore, I took that into Adobe Illustrator to tidy up the kerning and make it more legible as a number two by removing the tail on the end of the number and dragging up the top left ascender. Upon closer inspection, the counters of the letters were not clear enough when the name was in small point sizes. I opened these up to provide clearer letter forms at zoomed out perspectives.
I continued to brainstorm and played around with the distortion and warping styles to see if creating a shape withe the name had any better effect. I preferred the original rectangular shape as the simpler aspect felt more relatable and iconic.
Next was adding colour, because the brand focuses on various themes, various colours were needed to truly represent the broad mission, vision and values statements. As the vision is attainable luxury, the idea to bring darker hues was inspired by high-end fashion brands such as Prada and Louis Vuitton who use predominantly black and white in their logos. Obviously the logo needs to work in black and white but to stand out, I wanted to bring in a colour that was dark but had a deep colour undertone.
Looking at semiotics, I started with colours that were related to earth - blue and green to connote sky, sea and land - however I felt this was not suitable for a primary palette but could work as secondary colours to go with the brand themes. I also tried white and red with a stroke to ideate on the playful aspect of the brand. It looked too political as a St. Georges cross though and those colours were not used. I turned to Munsell’s colour theory and looked into the darker hues to see what could work. When researching, purple came across as a potential candidate. Darker shades of purple are synonymous with Cadbury’s now so I had to be cautious about how to use it. Therefore, pairing it with another colour would eliminate any obvious correlations.
In this theory, complimentary colours were popular for creating a sense of partnership and wholesomeness which paired perfectly with the down-to-earth phrase. The dark hue of the purple was far removed from any semiotics with Cadbury and closer to black to feel luxury and premium in line with the high-end fashion houses.
The mockup version of the brand bible came together after putting together a pitch presentation to showcase to a guest lecturer. I wanted it to look professional but also have that playful edge to mimic the brand’s identity.
On reflection, this was missing key elements of the brand assets and guidelines on how to use the branding. Therefore, in the final version these were added to look realistic to industry standard documents. The feedback I got was to remove the word trust from the values as it had the opposite effect by sounding untrustworthy. I also elaborated on the brand persona by integrating the target audience and personification together to create a human personality element to the brand and went into more detail about the characteristics. The competitor part was better justified through points of difference instead of just detailing their brand highlights.
As this was a clothing brand, I did mockup some clothing that might feature in a campaign. Looking back, this took up a considerable amount of time of the project and was not really a massive part of the branding aspect, so if I were able to do the project again, I would have spent a lot less time on this. However, it has allowed for a view of what the brand would look like out in the public domain and across social media and online marketplaces. The final versions used in the brand bible were designed in Pixelmator Pro and are truer reflections of the final pieces using actual clothing material than just sketches.
The final part was the visual examples for how the branding would look in real-world scenarios. I used the mockups to build an online storefront to show how it would look if it went live. If I had more time, I would have built a full prototype site with hyperlinks and animations. The main use of the webpage mockups were to show how the branding would look across various formats. As a clothing brand, this would predominantly be across social media channels such as Instagram and TikTok but also on web browsers. I also built a mockup for a high street storefront which was omitted as it needed more time to look realistic but this would have been a natural next step in the branding process were time permitting. The visual examples help bring the branding to life. Using the branding in line with marketing strategies would further enhance the brand image. This project has eluded to how grand a task creating a brand from the ground up is. Following how the brand assets are intended to be used is a thorough task and takes precision and attention to detail to make sure it is consistent throughout. It has definitely stretched my skillset over the last several weeks and has added tools to the tool belt that previously I did not posses.
Overall, the project was successful and has taken my understanding of branding principles to a new level. The application of academic theories and models to justify design decisions is imperative for consumer psychology and will improve my work in the future.