The Challenge

With the changing landscape of British retail, the opportunity for supermarket fashion to capture a larger, more diverse consumer base was evident. Now more than ever, the supermarket space is proving an increasingly popular battleground for retail. Situated inside one of the ‘big four’ supermarkets, F&F has been somewhat shielded from the dwindling footfall felt elsewhere in the high street, yet its brand appeal needed aligning more closely with its outward competitors. Our main challenge centered around bringing high street credibility to the supermarket retailer. There was a clear need to create a more cohesive, shoppable brand that takes pride of place alongside other high street brands elevating its fashion credentials.

What We Did

F&F’s setting within Tesco stores can be seen as advantageous, however this comes with its own challenges. The average consumer attention span when looking at packaging in a grocery store environment sat at 1.5 seconds – a huge factor in how we needed to design the packaging and visuals communications. With the wider campaign and brand strategy of ‘The Supermarket Woman‘ in the pipeline, Marmalade collaborated with Odd Agency and the in-house F&F team to align the below the line brand with new marketing initiatives. We also worked with talented Colophon to commission a bespoke modern typographic style and voice for the brand, one that sat comfortably alongside the new Tesco Modern font used instore. It was important to ensure the packaging and design systems had a strong future proofed fashionable aesthetic while still sitting comfortably within the Tesco environment.

Over 3 years of creative development, involving extensive print management and collaboration with existing global suppliers, our work with F&F culminated in a cohesive, forward-facing brand. Building on the trust of existing consumers and enticing new ones, the brand refresh looks to remove some of the stigma around supermarket fashion, aligning its look and feel closer to its high street counterparts, infusing the visual architecture with a confident fashion forward design.

The Impact

With a full and holistic look at the brand architecture, packaging and visual language Marmalade was able to reduce the quantity of ‘visual noise’ on the F&F sections within store. Reducing own brands from 33 to 8 hero brands also helped to increase consumer brand recognition by 300%.  Encouraging the brand to be visually confident about F&Fs fashion credentials has also increased the customer’s perception of ‘Great Price’ seeing an increase of 10%. Marmalade has also been instrumental in reducing the volume of bespoke artworks by 500% resulting in a cost saving to the brand of £400K+. This has been coupled with a reduction in waste through the introduction of more sustainable packaging materials.