Caro’s brand story

Renaming, rebranding and website redesign are words that strike trepidation into clients’ hearts and wallets.

Having gone through this process ourselves over the past two decades, we don’t underestimate the challenges and time it takes to get from A to B (via C, D, E and a lot of indecision about fonts) …and we’re delighted to be on the other side.

We really love good design, and we love championing new designers and new studios. Back in the early nineties, before Caro was officially Caro we worked with two quite brilliant RCA grads, Morag Myerscough and Jane Chipchase on the first iteration of our brand.

By the mid-noughties, the brand had germinated into something else, with the help of Form – a studio that we had collaborated with over the years on successful brand launches for clients and whose joie de vivre and music industry credentials always appealed. Working with them on our own brand was a great experience.

Weaving in some of the street cred of Wim Crouwel’s font work, Paul and Paula at Form developed the original Caro marque and our first website. As with all sites of the time, it was an all singing, all dancing, fully flourishing Flash extravaganza and a playful chromatic storefront.

The ensuing seven years saw us expand and, like many agencies, we focused on clients rather than ourselves, leaving our website and brand largely untouched until around 2014.

As times changed, and Flash lost its shine, we bit the bullet and started working with the imaginative team at Hyperkit, an agency we’d collaborated with on several projects, to develop a new, more content rich website.

At the same time Hyperkit refined Form’s original logo to slim it down a little and give it a crisper note in conjunction with the elusive Hermes font. The website has been really successful for Caro – hence we’ve taken our time to move on.

It’s hard to let something go that has encapsulated our identity for so long; you’ve probably noticed that specific orange seeping into your subconscious if you spend any time with us – we love it so much we use it everywhere, from phone cases through to the music speaker in our office.

But – change, as we always tell our clients, is vital.

So now it is 2023 and time to reveal our latest approach to brand Caro.

Working with friends and (you guessed it) long-term collaborators Studio Small, we are launching our refreshed identity and brand marque as well as a new website.

Optimised for digital and social media use, the compacted logo is refined again, and much stronger in relation to our channels and broader brand requirements.

The new website maximises the amazing projects and visuals we are lucky to work with, and we’ve also followed our own advice and gone for a bit more of a magazine style, allowing for longer form editorial and opinion pieces.

Studio Small have been patient with us over the long gestation of this latest work, for which we are very grateful. For Caro this is a next chapter. We’re looking forward to seeing how it looks to the broader design community.