Would you look at that. Art school graduates running legitimate businesses. Now we've seen it all.
Jody Cedzidlo has been a dear friend since our time together in the art department and she now runs an incredibly successful clothing line from her studio in Pittsboro, North Carolina. Flytrap Clothing is an inspired operation with a fierce dedication to local artisanry. To put it in Jody's own words:
"Flytrap is a steadfastly local business, even if we are not your local business. Our fabrics, leather, inks, dyes, and paper goods are all US-made. The seamstress that creates many of our garments lives in the same county. The milk and eggs in our refrigerator come from cows and chickens that graze just down the road. We trade t-shirts for breakfast at the local B&B, beans from our favorite local coffee roaster, and hearty greens from the farmer's market. We invest our profits in a network of farmers, artisans, and small businesses, so when you buy our products, your dollars support local enterprise and help our small community thrive."
Jody came to us last year looking for help refreshing her brand and we couldn't have been happier to be involved. Working with someone as keen an eye as hers certainly provides some challenges, but we were up for the task.
Jody tasked us with developing a mark that made use of a literal representation of her beloved plant. The venus flytrap is truly beautiful in form, but surprisingly difficult to represent via iconography. With a large plant head and a leafless, skinny stem - it's proportions are too imbalanced to have one flytrap stand on it's own.
In the end we created an organic, hand drawn type treatment that directly incorporated the flytrap illustration. This way the flytrap mark didn't have to stand on it's own, but also wasn't relegated to secondary or tertiary branding elements.