Indigo

The true beauty of a start-up is its absolute newness. Everything needs invention. And success is limited only by one’s capacity to imagine solutions, explain them and mobilize resources.

Indigo, a start-up, was doubly new for us: it was also BMD’s first commercial retail work. In collaboration with Toronto firm Kuwabara Payne McKenna Blumberg, we worked to invent how the on-site bookselling environment should look, feel, and communicate.

Selling books, we knew from our Zone work, is a notoriously fickle business, and the traditional method of distribution — the bookstore — faces serious challenges from superstores and online sales. Thus, the original brand voice needed to highlight the particular benefits of of this special transactional experience, channel attention through the stores and, ultimately, produce enormous business equity.

Applying the logic of a book’s internal wayfinding — its preliminary pages — to the consumer’s in-store experience of navigation, we fashioned Indigo into a “book”. Upon arrival, visitors can “flip” through the store’s “tables of contents” — drop-down banners, varying display labels and typefaces in subtle gradation.

Clear, simple, friendly, literate, intelligent and accessible. The Indigo brand comes through in its graphics, signage, marketing formats and product design.

And modulated through the expected gestures of language and color, and the less-expected of textures, images, materials, pricing, services, light, sounds and even smells, the identity captures positive energy and equity at each touchpoint connecting store and consumer.

Including checkout, as even shopping bags extrapolate the metapor.

It is a personality that speaks to the calm and intimate character of the stores, where inviting, comfortable surroundings and richly stocked shelves project an atmosphere that is simultaneously community centre and cultural department store.

Reinventing invention: BMD continues to work with Indigo, ten years later, developing concepts for the next generation.