How to design your way to 789% sales growth: the rise and rise of Green & Black’s.
How hard can it be to sell chocolate? After their 1991 launch, Craig Sams and Josephine Fairley, the husband-and-wife team that founded organic chocolate company Green & Black’s, found it surprisingly hard, pigeonholed as a niche product and hidden in specialist health stores. But after a redesign of its brand four years ago by design consultants Pearlfisher, the chocolate maker’s sales grew by 61% a year, in a market which was growing by just 1.8%.
When Green & Black’s approached Pearlfisher in 2002, the company’s virtuous credentials (it sourced cocoa beans for one of its chocolates under FairTrade agreements with such countries as Madagascar and the Dominican Republic) as an organically produced brand appealed to the ethical shopper, but didn’t help in the mainstream market.
Pearlfisher’s brief was to reposition Green & Black’s so the brand was seen as luxurious and premium, rather than merely worthy. Pearlfisher predicted that the organic tag would evolve, with values like luxury, quality and tastiness coming to the fore. Sarah Butler, Pearlfisher’s deputy creative director, explains: “The plan was to lead with the taste of the chocolate. From our research, we chose the themes that would influence our design: purity, authenticity and the idea of organic’s evolving meaning.”
A redesigned brand can lose its personality. Keeping it authentic is the biggest challenge Sarah Butler, Pearlfisher
The design team felt the new packaging needed to emphasise Green & Black’s sophisticated cocoa-rich taste. So their design put the product’s intense chocolate hit centre-stage, creating Green & Black’s very own special Pantone brown colour. “The shade of brown communicates the taste intensity of the product,” says Butler. “We created that specific tone because it is virtually the colour of the chocolate.”
The flavours in the range are indicated by coloured bands on the packaging, while layered type communicates quality and luxury. The organic mark is used as a supporting message, indicating good taste and premium appeal, rather than defining the brand as it once had. Butler says that this shift in focus posed the biggest challenge of the redesign. “There’s a danger when a designer is asked to make a brand look slick and luxurious that you can lose its personality. Maintaining a balance was the biggest challenge. That was at the forefront of my mind when working on the project – making sure that we retained Green & Black’s authenticity.”
As Green & Black’s product range has grown to include biscuits, drinking chocolate and ice cream, the distinctive design has been successfully and coherently transferred. For Butler, this has been one of the strengths of Pearlfisher’s work with Green & Black’s: “Designers always want to design an iconic brand with rigid rules. But in the future you’re going to have to break some of those rules. The trick is knowing which ones to break, in order to make the brand exciting without losing any of its personality.”
Since Pearlfisher’s work for Green & Black’s, sales have increased by some 789%. In part, this has been helped by the brand’s greater presence in supermarkets: Tesco now stocks 15 variants of the company’s bars, where once it sold just three. In less than four years, Green & Black’s has seen its market share soar from 1% to 7.4%, such a boom that the brand was recently snapped up for around £25m by confectionary giant Cadbury Schweppes.
Article first published in Design Council Magazine, Issue 1, Winter 2006