Brandee: named for the people behind the bar

Brandee started life as Brandy. I can see the appeal: it’s short, it’s friendly and it has brand right there in it. But in a business built around drinks, brandy is already something on the back bar. And it names a thing, when the app is really about people.

Swapping the y for ee changes what the word does. English already has a family of -ee words, and every one of them is a person on the receiving end of something:

• Employee — a person employed for wages or a salary
• Trainee — a person training for a job or a profession
• Payee — a person who is paid, or is to be paid
• Nominee — a person put forward for a position

Brandee joins the family.

Brandee: a person rewarded for giving brands key trade insights.

Same sound, same friendliness, but now the name describes the person using it. (It also stops the app sounding like a digestif.) Both the name and the strapline went through basic trademark searches before anyone got too attached to them.

Brandee has to work for three different people at once:

• Front-of-house staff, who need a reliable, engaging way to learn about the brands they serve, and to be rewarded for it
• Hospitality operators, who need training for their teams they can track, and a way to work with drinks brands
• Drinks brands, who need up-to-date training in front of the people who sell their products, and insight into how those products are doing on the shop floor

That’s a lot of jobs for one identity. And every venue and brand it works with already has a loud identity of its own.

Brandee sits alongside national restaurant chains, global beer brands and independent breweries. It shouldn’t try to out-shout any of them; it should look good standing next to all of them. So the brief for the logo was a balancing act. It had to:

• Be simple and appealing on its own, and still fit all three audiences
• Sit beside other brands without looking overbearing, contradictory or awkward
• Work in a single solid colour, with other colourways to line up with partners
• Be bold and confident, but not overwhelming
• Hint at data, growth and performance without being blatant about it
• Be straightforward, with a little playfulness and character
• Be something you’d happily wear on a T-shirt, and just as happy to put in a pitch deck

The answer splits the word in two. brand is set in a clean, straightforward sans serif, almost a placeholder, so the brands Brandee works with can bring their own character and tone without anything clashing.

Then the ee breaks into script: a personal, handwritten flourish that ends in an arrow, heading up and to the right like a line on a growth chart. The whole idea of the name — the person, not the product — sits in those two letters. So does the data.

It travels, too. The ee and its arrow can hook onto the end of a partner’s name and turn it into a call to action, aimed squarely at the people who make the decisions.

The strapline works twice over. Brands find the insights rewarding, because they’re getting good on-trade data from the people who actually pour their drinks. Front-of-house staff, meanwhile, are literally being rewarded.

The palette is two greens: an ultra-vivid one and a muted forest one. How much of each you use depends on who you’re talking to, front-of-house staff or the brands paying for the quizzes. Solid black or white copy adds contrast where it’s needed.

Tap a chip to copy its hex code.

A logotype that works in a pitch deck has to survive a staff T-shirt, too. On merch, the name runs diagonally across the shirt, too big to fit, with the arrow pointing up and out. On a phone screen, the ee and its arrow are enough on their own.