Crafting an authentic brand

3 December 2024

How do you create a brand vision and identity that’s as vibrant and storied as Petticoat Lane Market? By starting at its roots – with the stories, people, culture and textures, that define its legacy.

Our mission was clear: to honour the market’s rich history as (most likely) the East End’s oldest, while reimagining it as fresh, inclusive, and authentic for today’s community. Through onsite visitor research and lively workshops with locals, stallholders, and businesses, we immersed ourselves in the market’s recent history and gathered the insights needed to authentically position it for the future.

To breathe life into our vision, we proposed community art and fashion workshops, to create handmade, diverse textiles that could be ‘woven’ into the identity via fabric banners and other assets. Fabrics, patterns and textures inspired by the stalls and surrounding shops formed the very foundation of a bespoke visual identity

From the font up: We hand-crafted letters to build an entire alphabet (named unsurprisingly, Petticoat Sans) used to design the wordmark AND a distinct, unique visual language. This spoke to the genuinely ‘human’ aspect of the brand, the very ‘hands-on’ nature of the market, the history of diverse fashions, textiles from around the world, and of making things.

The results? Our work provides the strategic and creative springboard, as well as a graphic toolkit for local authorities to raise the market’s profile and re-energise the community as an ongoing, self-perpetuating endeavour.