Nick D'Urbano and Cece de la Montagne are partners in work and life. Maurèle was created to help their customers connect with themselves and live more thoughtfully through the ritual of taking pen to paper.
We were thrilled to help bring this brand to life at every touchpoint – from identity to the unboxing experience to a refined online retail experience that empowers customers to experiment and create beautiful, bespoke stationery.
In an era of bold, brash and “disruptive” upstarts entering the market to move fast and break things, this fine paper goods brand radiates gentle introspection and a return to the slower pace of a handwritten letter. The experience is less about a specific element – a logo, a color scheme, a font – and more about a feeling; a space that invites you to stay a while.
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An Analog Brand for the Connected Era
When creating Maurèle’s identity, we worked hard to develop a brand that felt timeless, refined and intentional but one that could still operate in the same field as direct-to-consumer upstarts.
Maurèle differs from these brands in that it is a digitally driven company that envelops you in the promise of a quiet moment and a comfortable corner.
From this foundation, we wanted to create a brand identity that felt spacious and expansive, like a breath of fresh air amid the crowded landscape of bright hues and millennial pinks that dominate the commercial scene today.
Stationery that Tells a Story
Maurèle invites customers to create their own personalized stationery from a series of templates inspired by the desks of luminaries including artist Salvador Dali, architect Frank Lloyd Wright and designer Helmut Lang.
Each template can be further tailored to customers’ tastes with a curated assortment of fonts, colors and papers. The templates we developed for Maurèle have a deep, rich narrative. Each was created not only for its immaculate design, but also because of the story it conveys.
But it’s no easy feat to create a design system of templates that feels inherently personal, displays enough personality to have shelf appeal and stands out in a crowded category but still leaves room for customers to include their own unique touches.
The cohesive set of templates is the product of hundreds of hours spent mixing and matching, battle-testing each template for potential pain points, such as long names, unique addresses, legibility.
The result is the best kind of design: inherently invisible, delightful to use and one of a kind.
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The Maurèle Difference
Maurèle's stationery boasts a distinct library of fonts crafted by independent foundries and type designers, printed on consciously sourced paper in partnership with family owned and operated printers with environmentally-friendly inks.
This story has so many layers, nuances and infinite ways to mix and match that we wanted to create a commerce experience that invited customers to stay for a while: to play and explore different templates, type configurations and layouts.
The experience had to be easy to navigate and seamless to add products to cart, but it had to invite whimsy, exploration and delight.
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