The Pelican Nursery
Brand strategy
Values
Logo
Visual identity system
Creative direction
Marketing collateral
Website
Content development
Challenge
The Pelican Nursery was established in 2008 by a father who had seen his own young daughter flourish at a local Montessori Nursery. He was so inspired, he decided to retrain and set up his own nursery, providing full day care to children from 6 months to 5 years.
10 years in with customer numbers healthy and a new Pelican Baby Nursery up and running, the desire was to be able to expand to a third nursery but the current look was not doing justice to the great work they were doing or the overall experience they delivered.
A new brand was needed to unify the nurseries, clarify the offer and bring staff together with a new set of values. Working with the founders we began by addressing one of the challenges many small companies face: being able to define those qualities that are often seen as ‘just the way we do things’ but are often the very traits that make them special and different from other nurseries.
Solution
We built the brand around a simple but essential truth: ‘giving parents the confidence to return to work’. Being explicit about the emotional pressure’s parents face and addressing that at the drop-off and pick-up helped reinforce a more compassionate customer experience.
With family and compassion being central tenets of the business, it was clear that an identity that more accurately reflected the new brand was needed. Using the founders’ family iconography of a ‘pelican in her piety’, we designed a new symbol that speaks to their caring and nurturing approach.
Accompanied by a soft yet fresh colour palette and a series of curves, the result is a more grown-up approach – appealing to parents – in a sector that is dominated by childlike images and objects.
We looked at what was needed, rather than what could be redesigned and developed a new prospectus, parent handbook that could be put together in-house along with templates for letters and policy documents that would create a consistent house style.
We’ve taken the brand across the business from the stationery and prospectus to the website and nursery environments including windows, signage and posters.
With its in-built variety, this is an identity system that is as flexible enough to appear as a hand made piece on notice boards as professionally printed window decals. As a result, it’s never corporate, and always in touch.
