It's Business, Baby - Collateral Damage

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Let me fill you in in a little secret. Your logo does not a brand make. So many companies assume that once you're set on a logo, it defines their brand and as soon as someone sees it they know exactly what they sell. There are very few companies that work like this; Coca Cola and Apple to name a few. When we see that infamous swirling script, we can practically taste the difference between Coke and a Pepsi - but that is only through the years of advertising and marketing that have been drilled into us.Your brand is so much more than a logo. It's how your company is perceived, so runs through to every level of your business - production, customer service, aftercare. Your brand is the experience your customer receives. Asda and Waitrose sell the same thing, but through their brands, we have expectations to the experience we will have when we walk through those doors. That being said, you can and should use your logo and chosen collateral as a visual representation of your brand.
We've been through many changes with the visuals of our brand since we started out in 2010 but we've always wanted to keep our visuals congruent through the website to our packaging to our physical marketing materials. By keeping consistency throughout the various visuals in your business, you're aiming to create a theme that should be easily recognisable whether it's a email newsletter, product packaging or business card; the receiver should be able to identify who is sending it without reading the brand name. As the company has grown, we've invested more in our packaging and marketing collateral and here are some of our current favourite brands;

• Cotton drawstring bags; our cotton drawstring bags are made and printed with our full vertical logo via The Clever Baggers. We have two sizes for our various Rosie headbands and are also available to buy as gift packaging. Use them to protect products, for standard packaging or as a printed product; for example these would make ace laundry bags for an illustrator.
• Swing tags; our swing tags include our text logo on one side and website details on the other and are minicards from moo.com We use these to finish our standard product wrapping for website orders and as swing tags on our products at events and fairs. Moo show loads of great ways to make use of this product in your business, from sweet mini business cards to gift tags.
• Business cards; again by Moo.com but this time using their Luxe Business Card product. Including our full vertical logo on the front and my details on the back; name, phone number, email address, website and twitter handle - Gareth has his own too. We use these at networking events and for potential clients; the thicker card with a rich seam of colour throughout the middle is a real talking point - these cards are so tactile they're more likely to stay in your new clients hands long enough for them to register the information on them, rather than get shoved into the bottom of a bag!
• Postcards; we get our postcards printed at Vistaprint because they're cheap and cheerful and always deliver the goods. We get through a lot of postcards on a day to day basis, so using a higher quality product here would not be viable for us. As well as promotional postcards, we also use the type pictured above as packaging for our clips and grips. We chose to use a cut out version of our text logo and a cute picture of pastel chalked hair so that when a clip or grip is attached to the card, it looks like it's already sitting in some hair. This works particularly well with the bows when we're at fairs - before we displayed them like this, there was always someone who picks up a bow clip and called it a bow tie! We also use postcards as notecards for custom orders and press deliveries and as promotional cards to promote a new range or a discount code. All our postcards include vital information about where to find out more about us; website and email address and social media links on the reverse.
• Gift boxes; our purple branded gift boxes are provided and printed by The Tiny Box Company. Using our full vertical logo lockup in an embossed silver foil on purple recycled kraft two piece boxes, we use these for gift packaging and standard packaging for more delicate products like our butterfly clips.