Bunnies By The Bay brand growth programme:

Giving the gift of love

Creating a new brand strategy, new brand identity, packaging and store design to help drive forward this beautifully crafted homemade US baby gift brand.

Challenge

With headquarters in Washington State, USA, Bunnies By The Bay produces a wide range of high quality personalised baby gifts and plush toys, designed to spread warmth, love and kindness. They are sold in premium gift, toy and collectibles retailers around the world. In 2020, Bunnies By The Bay asked us to identify the most effective and efficient ways to help them grow their brand.

Approach

We took the company on a three stage process to identify the most lucrative target consumer, to understand the need-states and mindsets of those consumers and to prioritise a list of specific tasks that would help move the business on to a stronger growth trajectory. Much of the work took place during the peak of the Covid-19 lockdown with teams based at home in Washington State, USA, Thailand and the UK. We developed a range of recommendations including an updated brand identity design, new communications and story-telling, new packaging and an exciting experiential store design.

The company has a unique story – it was created in 1983 after a fishing boat tragedy off the coast of Washington State. As a way of soothing the pain, the founding sisters began making cloth bunnies and writing stories about them. The bunnies became so popular that they are now sold globally as special lifelong keepsakes. They are for the givers, so that they may give comfort to the ones they love.

The new logo and identity system was created with a warm, handmade look and feel. New guidelines for photography and illustration were produced and a set of icons was also developed to convey the special qualities and characteristics of the products.

A key touchpoint that Brand Design Lab created for Bunnies by the Bay was the concept store. This project was the culmination of the brand strategy and identity development, to create the ideal in-store experience for Bunnies by the Bay. It integrates storytelling, interaction, personalisation and curated visual merchandising to bring the updated Bunnies by the Bay brand to life in a physical space.

BDL has worked closely with Bunnies by the Bay for a number of years designing their spaces within the various FAO Schwarz stores. FAO Schwarz Beijing, London, Dublin and most recently Milan all have Bunnies by the Bay shop-in-shops and integrate different touchpoints which add interaction, storytelling, visual merchandising and personalisation offers, enriching the FAO Schwarz store experience.

Results

Vision and goals definition, positioning, purpose, values and personality definition, channel strategy, a new brand identity, website and email templates, packaging, experiential store design and designs for other key touchpoints.

“Our experience with Brand Design Lab was a gentle, long, hard look in the mirror. The journey challenged everything we believed about our business and brand. At times, the decisions to make recommended changes took more courage than brains. Our intent in engaging Brand Design Lab had been to reach a broader audience and to share our passion for giving glad dreams to younger customers, yet we had struggled to achieve that authentically on our own. Brand Design Lab helped us find what had eluded us for years and our customers responded joyfully! In a short period of time customers that had pegged us into certain categories, took a second look. Our refreshed identity, art, photography style and store designs gave us a modern yet timeless appeal.”

Jeanne-Ming Hayes
Chief Executive Officer
Bunnies By The Bay