When you’re a fourth-generation family-owned business nearing its 90th year in operation, you cherish your company history.
But a hallmark of Connells Maple Lee Flowers & Gifts’ enduring legacy is honoring its past while still being willing and able to change course when circumstances dictate.
That agility has made Connells Maple Lee one of the most successful florists in the United States.
Sometimes change is thrust upon you suddenly, as it was during the coronavirus pandemic, an existential threat that forced Connells Maple Lee to rethink many of the ways it functioned. At other times, Connells Maple Lee has had to respond to structural developments in society, which brings us to our latest rebranding effort.
The first glimpse of that new look and feel began arriving in customers’ mailboxes this fall in the form of our year-round and fall catalogs.
Increasingly digital world
Go Welsh, our long-time design agency, is leading the rebranding.
“Whatever we do and propose,” said agency owner Craig Welsh, “it has to live in digital, but it can’t feel digital.”
At its heart, the rebranding addresses the challenge of promoting the organic feeling of flowers in an increasingly digital world.
More than half of our sales now occur online. All those swipes, clicks and taps come at a faster pace than the turning of a printed page, making it harder to capture the public’s attention.
The new catalogs feature a reworking of our logo, distilled from the long-stemmed flower it has been for decades into a clean, contained round icon that’s more recognizable across media.
On social media, Craig noted, an “icon becomes much more prominent in the expectation” among users. And with increased awareness, that icon can become the brand’s primary mark, lending itself to many more uses.
Mid-century modern
The icon makes for a “much cleaner brand presence visually,” Craig said, but the flip side is that the mathematical representation of shapes, lines and curves in the digital realm can overpower the organic world.
That’s why Go Welsh seized on the idea of bringing organic into the mix through inks made from flower petals and stems. Jenna Flickinger, a Go Welsh designer, keeps vials of ink at her desk, with labels such as lily, lavender and pansy, and clematis.
She boils the petals herself, adding salt (to release color) and gum arabic (a stabilizer) to create ink. She brushes the ink onto watercolor paper and then scans the washes into her computer.
Some of the colors and textures have been incorporated into the new catalogs, but the learning process continues. From vial to dried paper, the ink colors aren’t always predictable.
“Even though this was a pink carnation,” Jenna said of one example, “it still [dried as] this yellow color.”
Craig described the rebranding as a “mid-century modern aesthetic,” invoking a design style known for sleek lines connected to nature and a timeless essence.
“We’re trying to find a place where we can combine this organic sensibility with the vector, screen-based digital stuff, so we started looking at mid-century modern sensibilities,” Craig said.
It starts with the new catalogs, but you can expect to see many more representations in the year ahead.
