Vera Wang

Vera Wang built one of the most emotionally powerful brands in American fashion around a single, defining moment: the wedding day. Her authority in bridal was absolute—the name synonymous with a standard of style, beauty, and craft that brides sought above all others. But as a business, bridal design has a structural ceiling. The question the company faced during a period of significant growth ambition was whether its authority in bridal could translate into other categories—whether the trust and passion Vera Wang earned for that one transcendent moment could become the basis of something much larger.

The foundational insight was this: a reputation as the world's leading bridal designer is not a limitation. It is a license. The emotional equity Vera Wang had built—the association with singular style, showstopping beauty, and exquisite taste—could extend into any category that those values could legitimately inhabit. Our work was to make these extensions coherent, category by category, without losing a single thread of what made the brand unmistakably hers.

Over four years, we brought Vera Wang into eight new business verticals. The discipline was consistent throughout: every design decision had to respond directly to Vera’s aesthetic and sensibility, as if the work itself were an extension of her hand.

We began with designing the packaging for a new line of ready-to-wear jewelry. The program's distinctive fabrication, integrated ribbon handles, and considered form factors became a new standard for brand extension. The ribbon was not a decoration. It was a design decision—sourced from a Japanese manufacturer whose entire purpose is the beauty and meaning of such moments, chosen for its precise texture and weight after days of consideration. The program embodied Vera’s combined sense of tough and beautiful. That level of attention became the practice’s baseline for everything that followed.

The first Vera Wang ready-to-wear retail store, on Mercer Street in SoHo, received complete naming, branding, environmental graphics, and packaging—a program designed from the outset to scale to Los Angeles and Paris. Shopping bags in embossed watercolor-grade paper with oversized ribbon handles, and black metal grommets installed inside out so the rough side was seen first. Blind-embossed gift boxes with stark black metal archival corners. Every material chosen for how it would feel in someone's hands, and how it would embody the brand.

The Vera Wang Lavender line extension received a new logotype, a refreshed color palette, and shoebox design for a line of ballet flats—including a grommet at the front of the box that made it easier to slide from a stack, a detail overlooked by most but felt by everyone.

The luggage collection, manufactured in partnership with Hartmann, was a unique moment for us. We had never designed leather goods, so we had to learn an entirely new universe of language and manufacturing. The aesthetic approach was inspired by a unique aspect of Vera’s design language: her distinctive use of angled, layered fabrics. We translated that into black leather and microfiber. We designed a new frame construction with Hartmann’s assistance which allowed the five scaled rolling pieces to nest inside each other for storage. A tote, a rolling duffel, and a doctor’s bag completed the set. Inside, custom lavender fabric presented an unexpected hit of brand color. We also designed hang tags and promotional pieces.

The home fragrance line gave us another opportunity to design both packaging and product. Several of the candle vessels were conceived with secondary lives—as wine chillers and keepsake boxes—objects that would remain in use long after the fragrance was gone, continuing to carry the brand into daily life.

This work supported a significant increase in revenue, and brought the brand into eight new categories, without diluting the equity it had spent decades building. The coherence was maintained the way Vera Wang herself maintained it—through an insistence on the highest quality of thinking, design, and fabrication at every level, in every category, in every moment a customer might encounter the brand.

Every experience, every choice reinforcing the single truth about who she was.