Started in Vancouver, Canada, Well Kept is a wellness brand that creates natural and sustainable personal-care products for women. With the environment and natural beauty at its core, Well Kept strives to create a community for collective growth and to open dialogue on topics that continue to defy the status-quo of the current beauty standards.
Co-founders Natalie and Emilie started Well Kept as the target audience themselves, trying to find products that were not available at the time. Since 2017, the brand has grown and done very well, but Natalie and Emilie recognized that their current web presence was not reflective of the brand that Well Kept has grown into. Natalie and Emilie reached out to us to tackle their struggles with their website and improve their direct online orders.

Through our early conversations with Emilie and Natalie, we learned that they strive in every part of their brand to be aware of Well Kept’s environmental impact. From the considered formulation of their products to the careful selection of packaging materials, this commitment spurred in us a curiosity around how their new website design could, as a digital entity, also play a part.
Our research tells us that the internet’s carbon footprint is 830 million tons—on par with the aviation industry. The facts left a deep impression on our team and inspired us to look for ways to design more environmentally conscious. For this project, we aimed to reduce energy consumption by using only system fonts, smaller image file sizes, and reduced video content (especially of the auto play variety). We also provided a dark mode version of the site, allowing viewers to save power consumption.
In redesigning the website, one of our main objectives was to provide more product information and greater transparency on how Well Kept is working towards reducing their environmental impact. To work towards these efforts, we included an informative accordion section for each product and an Impact page was created to highlight Well Kept’s sustainability efforts to date.
As an added visual effect, we implemented a raindrop effect that appears on two areas of the homepage when the user hovers over the active block.
While our intentions were earnest, the launched website did not result in a smaller carbon footprint as we had hoped. Despite the results, the experience truly inspired us to continue learning how to design and develop responsibly for all future projects.
As a design studio, we believe there is still a lot more we can do in making these choices. We’ll be taking what we learned from this project to continue improving our best practices within design, as well as the many industries we have the opportunity to work with along the way.

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Location

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Website

Well Kept

At the tail end of September 2022, we worked with travelware brand LOJEL to create a campaign featuring Niru, their in-city nylon collection and Iloj, their everyday leather accessories collection.
As LOJEL’s offerings expand further into everyday travel, our proposal for the campaign was to feature two influential individuals from Los Angeles, exploring their connection to the city. From thoughts on their daily commute; to what community means to them; our goal was to celebrate the contributions to the people and spaces they’ve built around their respective lives.
The core theme that drives this campaign is the idea of “moving to connect”. From point A to point B, whether locally or abroad, our movement is often a means to make a connection—with an old friend or a new one, with family, or in an effort to connect with ourselves. The movement of a city makes it vibrant and full of life.

On our first day of the shoot, we spent time with Jazzi McGilbert, owner of Reparations Club, a bookstore and gathering place for the community. Much of the interior of what locals refer to as &#8220;Rep Club&#8221; harkens back to Jazzi&#8217;s grandmother&#8217;s living room—an intimate and welcoming experience that Jazzi strives to recreate for her visitors. She graciously shared her story with us, highlighting her unwavering connection to LA—the place where she grew up and keeps coming back to.
The second day on set featured Shin Okuda, furniture maker and owner of Waka Waka. In contrast to Jazzi&#8217;s story, Shin had traveled from Japan to the United States and unexpectedly made Los Angeles home. Through our conversations, Shin shares with us his design process, the creative freedom he experiences in LA in contrast to Japan, and his unique relationship with the use of colour in his work.
Both individuals inspired us on many levels and shared with us a glimpse into their everyday movements and relationship to the city.

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Styling

Videography

LOJEL Stories — Jazzi McGilbert, Shin Okuda

During the start of our studio in 2012, we had the privilege of meeting photographer Gillian Stevens and worked on a number of photoshoots together. Since then, Gillian has been a great friend of the studio and we were thrilled when she launched her self-titled clothing label.
Each of Gillian’s collections is carefully designed with quality and made to last. As a firm believer in slow fashion, Gillian’s products are made with sustainable practices, building close relationships with manufacturers and suppliers.
Since 2020, Gillian had already built a successful base for her brand. Prior to her Fall 2022 collection, she approached us to refine her brand identity to better reflect the quality and intentionality in her clothing line.

From our discovery process, we identified the concept of slowing down as a core theme to the Gillian Stevens brand—to reduce both our speed of consumption as well as our pace of life. This theme became our main source of inspiration as we designed the brand identity.
As we considered the common activities people turn to while seeking a moment of stillness, reading was a clear source of life for many who wanted to slow down.
Our design concept takes inspiration from the timelessness of printed text and the slight variations that appear as a result of ink being pressed into the paper and bleeding into the fibers. Focusing on this detail, we adjusted each letterform to portray this subtle effect to create a wordmark with its own unique personality.
For the brand system, we created a &#8220;tree grid&#8221;, giving the content an organic and unique structure. In this system, groups of content/text are laid out as branches or leaves on a tree. When applying this system to an image, this allows us to play with the placement of the content in relation to the subject in the image (ie. the title sits on top of the elbow of the model).

Gillian Stevens

Brand Identity

2022

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