Case Study: Patagonia Charlotte
Designing with Ventura's Finest
Nearly every Patagonia employee in Ventura received an email from me between 2006—2010. I hadn’t graduated from the design program in Florida yet (🐊), but I knew I wanted to work with them ever since I saw my papa wearing a few of their McFetridge tees. Their ethos of environmental stewardship and sustainability was unlike any other business I’d heard of, and they’ve stayed true to that goodness.
My first response came from the wonderful Michelle Rozo, art director for apparel graphics, about two months after I graduated. Huzzah! Endless e-mailing works! I had a little more work to show by then and she asked me to sketch a few kids’ graphics and a logo tee.
Ahem… at that time I didn’t know ‘logo tee’ meant riffing on their iconic Fitz Roy peaks in some fresh and stylized way. I absolutely misunderstood the assignment…ahem!!! and with a shiny new BA in Graphic Design 😎, overconfident (YET HUMBLE), I continued to misread a few more emails that led me to believe I was pitching a 2010 rebrand for Patagonia. I told my mom immediately!
Fast forward fifteen years and the logo is still the same (this was for the best)… but I had the pleasure of seeing a kid tee printed (innnnn tWoOo colorways)! That was the extent of my work with them. Michelle moved departments and I fell out of touch, emailing every so often trying to sound… not…too… desperate.
Universal Serendipidee
About two years ago one of the new Patagonia directors saw that I had photographed my bud’s wedding up in Big Sur. (Bud is an understatement, but this newsletter is already too long.) He and his wifey met working at Patagonia, where he still works his design magic today. Hi Stephen, miss you!
I digress, but this is how I re-entered the Ventura circle of sustainable fun. Not by way of graphic design, but by something I almost said no to…because I am not a wedding photographer. My wife is a wedding photographer. Not me. It seems this phenomenon, where opportunities arise unexpectedly, is fairly universal.
The creative director clicked through a wedding post Stephen shared and found I was a graphic designer in Charleston, a Herculean stone’s throw from Charlotte. She asked if I’d be interested in helping with the branding of their newest flagship in Charlotte, located in South End’s historic Nebel Knitting Mill.
“I do!” I mean “Yes!”
They presented me with the emblems and badges of their existing stores and asked me to start there. There’s a sense of place to each one (obviously)—often featuring regional animals or natural landmarks. The Carolinas share a diverse realm of biomes, so it’s not hard to find a steady stream of inspiration from Mother Nature. From the mountains to the coast and all of the beautiful Piedmont in between, I was eager to feature plants and animals from across the region.
Below is a smattering of some of the initial explorations and sketches, and then a direction we started honing in on.
The badges for their store locations are pretty illustrative vs. the type of logoing I’m used to. I like to approach branding projects with simplicity, often daydreaming they’d print pretty in one of Kuwayama’s volumes of trademarks. 🤓 That said, I love to fill a project with doodles. (Doodle Jazz.) I was pleased with the direction it was headed in, but the team felt we should focus the identity on just one plant and one animal. This was a bit challenging for me, until we cut our dogwood down.
Flowering Dogwoods
Ever since my little one was born (5 years ago now) I’ve spent every season with her tending to a little yard experiment—ditching lawn in favor of native flowers, shrubs and trees. Our tree canopy had a head start, with a beautiful willow oak standing about five stories tall, a magnificent magnolia in the back corner, a massive sweetgum, several water oaks lining the property line and one beautiful dogwood, which had started to fry that year.
Every year our family looked forward to those delicate blooms. One long lower limb reached away from the house, offering Carolina wrens a flowered path to hop along, right up to the eaves. We noticed it blooming earlier and earlier each year, a stress brought about by our changing climate. 2023 was the year we didn’t get a bloom and many branches snapped dry.
Now, the flowering dogwood happens to be the state flower of North Carolina. It was a little sign to pay homage to our tree.
Native Bees
With the dogwood set, I went back and forth on birds and insects perched on a branch. The team in California kept hinting at incorporating a honeybee, as it is the state insect of NC, but I have become something of a Tallamythian over the past five years. I first read Nature’s Best Hope by Doug Tallamy back in 2020 (expect a post on this), and was so inspired by his simple call to action: Plant native plants in your backyard to support native wildlife. If we all do it, we can connect the fragmented habitats all of our yards have become and create a “Homegrown National Park.” It led me down the rabbit hole of those aforementioned native plants, and in turn taught me about our native pollinators.
“Restoring habitat where we live and work… will go a long way toward building biological corridors that connect preserved habitat fragments with one another.”
Doug T!
With over 500 species in North Carolina alone, (4,000ish in the US and 20,000ish worldwide) native bees play a crucial role in protecting biodiversity. These little beings are essential pollinators for numerous plant species, contributing to ecosystem health, global food security and the reproduction of a wide variety of plants.
Honey bees don’t cover the wide range of ecological roles played by our diverse native bee communities…In order to conserve the full species diversity and resilience of our ecosystems, we need our native bees.
Chris Helzer, Director of Science for The Nature Conservancy - Nebraska
A Teeny Bit on Process
Receptive to the native bee (a simple representation of one of the bumbles :) and the flowering dogwood, we ended up here:
Many of the shapes I used throughout the project were cutouts using good old fashioned scissors. At a small scale it isn’t that noticeable, but I love the character this process can bring to shapes. A lot of the textures were drawn and squiggled by my daughter. We used crayons and dried out micron brushes for that thirsty-ink feeling. (This was one of the first projects I brought her in to help with.)
The color palette was defined by a senior art director, which was a fun limitation to work with, and once we signed off on the badge I felt like my little illustration party began!
As I mentioned, it was hard to narrow the badge down to one plant and one creature—there’s simply too much Cackalacky goodness, and the project didn’t feel complete without including more. There were quite a few remnants from early explorations, and although they didn’t ask for this, I developed a library of vignettes to expand on the store’s visual identity and storytelling capabilities.
I have a recommendation: do a BUNCH of stuff
-Stephen (bud)
The team had only requested the Charlotte badge and a single piece of collateral—but Stephen encouraged me to create as much as I wanted to pitch, thinking it could inspire opportunities for opening day. (Not his first retail rodeo.)
I’m not one to push a scope more than need be, but I pick my moments, and I found myself getting lost in these cutouts and doodles! It had also been a longgg time since I’d worked with Patagonia, and I was looking for a K.I.T. message at the end of this.
Doing the extra bits allowed us to visualize a more drawn out identity, and, just as Stephen (bud) foresaw, these illustrations connected me with a few of the Grand Opening coordinators. One of those people was Andrew Farison, ⟡˖ ࣪ Retail Event Marketing Specialist, ࣪ ˖⟡ who really let me go for it!
From MiiR bottles to animal blocks, tees printed on-site to camping mugs full of beer, woven patches to enamel pins, coloring sheets, a hundred posters for the first arrivals, and quite a bit of indoor signage—we applied these graphics across production templates galore to open Charlotte’s doors with.
Many thanks are due, but I’d like to shoutout Danielle Egge and Araceli Garrido for guiding me through it all from the beginning and letting me push the scope of the project a bit. They were absolutely wonderful to work with, as was everyone else that emailed me back fifteen years later! <3
Happy Earth Day, everyone! 🌍
as a fellow designer and patagonia lover from charlotte, as well as a long time fan of your work (Graft, et al) love hearing the story behind this. thanks so much for sharing.
Thanks for sharing Blake! So great. We lost a redbud up here in virginia (not from climate change, though the constant earlier blooming continues to freak us out). i feel like i know what it feels like to be attached to a local tree!