Gaskell Wool Rich is the expert name in wool loop pile carpets. Gaskell is a brand with a long heritage and a passion for beautifully crafted carpets that are by their very nature sustainable – being a natural product it is much kinder for the environment than man-made products. The carpets are sourced from both here in the UK and from around the world.

Gaskell Wool Rich supplies high-quality wool loop carpets to the residential and refurbishment markets. Internal discussions concluded that Gaskell’s product range generally suited the higher end of the market and that it should champion its more premium products. It was necessary to still recognise that the brand has a product range that can suit different price points and could reach consumers and interior designers with smaller and larger budgets.

Historically, Gaskell Wool Rich has not marketed to the consumer and has focussed on the retailer, supplying them with sample displays, sampling, a dedicated B2B website and a team of sales reps for them to contact. The disadvantage of this route to market is that the retailer has a lot of influence over which product the consumer buys. The brand needed to be more consumer-focussed, which in turn would create consumer interest and demand rather than relying on the retailer to sell the brand in a mostly passive way.

Our task was to re-design the brand to make it fit for purpose. Gaskell Wool Rich needed to raise brand awareness amongst consumer and interiors professional to encourage positive demand-pull, to create request-led enquires and sales rather than the retailer orientated recommendations.

The existing brand identity required a complete overhaul to provide a solid basis for this approach. We began from the ground up by interrogating the basics of the brand language – the logo. Every line, contour and letter was carefully considered and re-worked to transform an inconsistent and poorly realised marque into a sophisticated, polished and stylish brand presence to support the new brand strategy.

Once the brand identity had been developed we created a comprehensive set of identity guidelines to ensure that the brand was ready and fit for use internally and by third party users once the rollout began. At Bob Design and Marketing we are experts at advising and developing brand guideline documentation and we worked with Gaskell to devise the precise requirements for the brand, which we presented in two distinct parts: firstly the ‘Elements’ that comprised all of the core brand identity assets such as logo, streamline and colour palette; and secondly ‘Application’ which demonstrated how the brand is used, with examples of items from stationery through to social media and retail displays.

With the new identity in place it was crucial that the brand was presented accurately as it entered into the public domain through retailers and online. Bob worked with Gaskell to decide on a series of brand applications that would be the most likely touch points. These we set to work on, creating template styles for everything from price lists to product labelling, point of sale to sample binders. The new signature style of Gaskell was applied carefully throughout with monochrome hero photography providing the brand with a calm sophistication. A secondary colour palette consisting of a set of suitably subtle, muted shades of Gaskell Red, Gaskell Green and Gaskell Earth allows the brand to be more flexible in its visual approach, for example in digital applications, where email marketing makes use of these colours to give weight and emphasis to a range of content items while retaining on overall sense of reflection and calm.