Stationery is one of the businesses that you’d expect to produce a lot of waste. However, you can start a good business through eco-friendly branding. Combining stationery with sustainability gives you leverage to fulfill modern demands for more sustainable products.
How do you perform an eco-branding strategy for a stationery brand? What visual aspects should you incorporate in the branding visual?
Stationery is a business with a profound environmental impact, even if you are not a large corporation. Conventional notebooks, writing tools, folders, stickers, and other products leave a significant amount of waste. Many of these products are made of plastic, toxic ink, and industry paper that is hard to recycle.
To attract customers with higher sustainability demands, your stationery brand needs to be eco-friendly. This can be achieved through the materials and production process, but your branding can help promote these qualities.
Stationery companies like Botanical Paperwork, Onyx and Green, and Minted are known for their sustainable brands. You can learn from them about how to utilize eco-friendly branding.
Eco-friendly branding needs multiple channels and tricks to inform customers about your values immediately.
Sustainable stationery brands can use social media and online catalogs to promote sustainability through visuals. For example, you can showcase the materials used for the products, such as recycled paper for notebooks, bamboo pens, and compostable wrapping paper.
Another way is to emphasize the messages through the exterior. For example, Twigs Paper maintains the natural brown color of its recycled paper for the notebooks. The cover also shows a simple text: Eco Book.
Finally, invest in good message and copywriting. Many eco-friendly brands emphasize transparency and storytelling, especially when the customers are more critical than ever. Aside from describing the best things about your brand, make sure you tell your customers about your accountability.
Eco-friendly branding has several familiar visual cues that signal the product values to the public. You can utilize some of these visual elements to emphasize the sustainability of stationery products.
Here are some of the popular visual elements:
Stationery products showcase creative designs, so you cannot be 100 percent consistent about color uses. However, earth colors are essential in making customers believe your values.
Leaf green and soil brown are not the only colors to include as “earth colors”. You can use sea turquoise, sky blue, and earthy shades of red and orange. Even if you use bold colors, they are usually sparse or balanced with more natural ones.
Nature inspires stationery designs every day. However, eco-friendly branding efforts can better utilize nature imagery. These efforts care about delivering the sustainability message at a glance.
Experiment with various shapes, colors, and styles of flowers, trees, roots, mountains, leaves, and many more. Make them your identity when it comes to designs. Plus, you can modify these images in various styles so your designs will not be boring.
What about typical eco-friendly images like the recycle symbol? Unless you design custom stationery, you should avoid overused symbols.
Eco-friendly marketing tends to utilize a lot of minimalist styles. They can be something like keeping the natural brown shade on the notebook covers, using simple texts, and letting the organic pen or pencil unpainted.
While minimalist visual is not always the rule (especially if you want to showcase artwork), you can add the “raw” look instead. For example, print or draw the artwork on textured recycled paper.
Eco-friendly branding is often associated with organic-looking fonts and typefaces. This means you may see a lot of rounded or delicate typefaces. Sometimes, you may also see brands that utilize handwritten fronts, which emphasize the natural look.
Again, this is not always the rule, but you can utilize these fonts when you try to “send a message” through your stationery brand.
Choosing the right font is just one element of creating the perfect branding. However, you can always order our service to create custom fonts. You can get the perfect font that matches your intended message, including stationery designs.
Also, shop around the Zarma Type catalog to find the best fonts for eco-friendly branding. You can promote a sustainable stationery brand with the right fonts through compelling branding visuals.
