Vera Wang

A comprehensive brand program would support Vera Wang’s expansion into new categories, leveraging the reputation she had built as one of the world’s most renowned designers of bridal fashion.

With every project we designed for Vera and her team, our work was required to respond directly to her unique aesthetic. We needed to quickly understand how to bring her vision across multiple categories, and how to attract audiences to a variety of products with a wide range of prices—without diluting or losing the brand’s hard-earned equity. We brought the company into several new verticals, helping to establish it as a highly desirable lifestyle brand.

Packaging design played a prominent role in the brand extension. Our first project was the design of a packaging program for a new line of ready-to-wear jewelry. The packaging’s distinctive fabrication, form factors, and integrated ribbon handles set a precedent for future projects in other categories, such as the packaging for new fragrance, Vera Wang Look Elixir.

We updated the brand of Vera Wang Lavender, Vera’s first line extension. This included new logotype, refreshed color palette, and a shoebox design for a line of ballet flats. We also designed the naming, branding, environmental graphics, and packaging for Vera’s first ready-to-wear retail store, on Mercer Street in SoHo, NYC. The program included extensions for future location expansion to Los Angeles and Paris. Shopping bags and gift boxes featured embossed, watercolor-grade paper; the bags used oversized ribbon handles and black metal grommets; the gift boxes had black metal archival corners.

The design program for a line of luggage, to be manufactured by Hartmann, was informed by Vera’s distinctive use of angled layers of fabric, in this instance fabricated in black leather and microfiber. The complete set—consisting of five sizes of rolling pieces, a tote, a rolling duffel, and a doctor’s bag—utilized new construction techniques that we helped to develop. For efficient storage, the rolling pieces were designed to nest within one another. Custom lavender interior fabric and embossed leather zipper pulls completed the brand experience.

When we designed Vera’s new line of home fragrance, we had the opportunity to work on both the packaging and the product. Several of the candle vessels have secondary uses, such as wine chilling and keepsake collecting.

Our time working with Vera and her team was truly special. We rolled out several successful new lines in support of a massive growth phase for her brand. Through it all, the company’s attention to detail, care about the most minor aspects of customer experience, and insistence on the highest qualities of thinking, design, and fabrication, were inspiring.