Mount Rose Alchemy
Mount Rose Alchemy is a beauty product brand founded by academic, activist, and rock music lover Sarah Jane. The product is hand-crafted with care and locally harvested ingredients in Mount Rose, Nevada.
The Goal
Develop a resilient, flexible brand that a boot-strapping small business can utilize for years.
My Role: Chief Brand Designer and Illustrator
Discovery
I began by conducting a small workshop with Sarah Jane. We found through a journaling session that her target market is the busy activist who craves more self-care time. The brand appeals to an alternative aesthetic while promoting a connection to one’s inner nature. I then conducted market research in the beauty industry and other areas of interest to Sarah Jane, such as protest posters and vintage album covers.
Solution
Logo
We went with a dreamy, witchy-western, femme-rock feel. I elicited nature by using watercolors on rough cold-pressed paper. The passing phases of the moon hint at the promise and hope of the ever-changing nature of existence, bringing us back to the present moment in our own self-care. Geometric shapes were added in the digital phase to create a juxtaposition of structure and a sense of completeness.
Color Scheme
Because the feeling words we uncovered in our brand workshop included “dreamy,” “look within,” and “rest,” the color scheme is very dark and spacey, grounded by a rich, purple-gray-black. We also created a secondary color theme that Sarah Jane could build on over time. As she launched new products, she could think along brand guidelines about what differentiating color to apply to the new product line.
Fonts
I used Futura for the Wordmark, and worked with Sarah Jane on discovering general font styles she could use in Canva moving forward. We landed on heavy slab serifs and handwritten themes to complement the edgy rock-Western theme of the brand.
Additional Graphics
Mount Rose Alchemy also produced a series of stickers that ran with the night sky theme.
Collaterals/Templates
Moving forward, Sarah Jane used Canva to create labels for her products. I worked with her to create a series of templates that could be used interchangeably on different packaging types.
Final Deliverables
The final deliverables included:
Four logo variations in three formats (CMYK high resolution, RGB web resolution, and black-and-white)
Two additional graphics
Twelve product templates
A brand toolkit that Sarah Jane could revisit and share with employees when making decisions that would influence the brand.
