New Town Bakery
Branding
Case Study
Spring 2024
Challenge
Create a new look for a long running Asian family bakery to capture new customers and to fit into the location while keeping it’s essence for their long term customers.
New Town Bakery is a family-run bakery specializing in Chinese and Filipino baked goods. The bakery has been around since 1980 with its first flagship location in Chinatown which is still open. Clean, Friendly, and Nostalgic is what this re-brand wants to speak. Even though the Chinatown area is losing it's essence, we have incorporated a mixture of English and Chinese (Cantonese) into the brand assets. With the two languages in place, New Town still caters to the many local seniors and people who live near the area.
Stratgey
Clean. Friendly. Nostalgic
New Town Bakery’s re-brand is all about building awareness to new generations/customers while giving those who still visit and love New Town Bakery a new look while allowing them to feel a sense of nostalgia. The first step was to create an overall tagline to sum up what this re brand should be all about for New Town Bakery. As a past customer of New Town Bakery, it used to be everyone’s childhood bakery. It was either your mom or dad who would take you to the bakery to purchase a ton of baked goods that could last you weeks before you had to go back. Usually these baked goods were eaten as an after school snack or your breakfast. I took my experiences as well as many others to create New Town’s new tagline which is “The Bite That Bring You Back”. The reason behind this tagline is to hint back to the many delicious goodies that they offer and how it was back of everyone’s childhood or even life. Once you take a bite of one of their baked goods, it sparks memories of the pasts of when you had them. This tagline hits home for many returning customers but for new customers it can be taken as once you’ve take a bite of their baked goods, it just hits home when it was a familiar taste or a taste that was love at first bite.
Solution
The Bites That Bring You Back.
Clean, Friendly, and Nostalgic is what this re-brand wants to speak. New Town already has been using an orange color as their brand color however I changed it to a red-orange as the color red has a symbolic meaning in Asian culture especially in Chinese culture with it meaning “luck”. With the logo, the decision to use the Chinese characters for New Town Bakery was no doubt a must as there are a lot of seniors mostly of those of Asian background who refer to New Town Bakery as “新城” (direct translation - new city) The logo was then incorporated with a steamed bun and create into a stamp/sticker format to easily be used for other assets. With the illustrations, the pineapple buns, butterfly cookies and steamed buns are the most recognizable and popular items at New Town which is why I decided to create illustrations that could also become stickers to make a great asset for the re brand. I ended up taking the fill illustrations of the three baked goods and turned them into mono-line work so that it could be used for New Town’s packaging or even marketing communications. For majority of the marketing side of the re brand, the idea was to push the delicious the baked goods that New Town offers. But to make it more personalized and to give it a more nostalgic feel, I decided to hand-write in English and Chinese (traditional) “Jenny’s favorites” as if Jenny was the one writing it.
Key Takeaways
The idea of this project started from my interest in Asian culture and my love for Chinatown has been there since I was born. Chinatown has been a part of my childhood and when I heard that businesses were closing down and the essence of what Chinatown was before was not present in the past recent year, it got me very emotional. One of the businesses I was happy to hear that it was still there was New Town Bakery. I remember my mom buying a lot of baked goods on Saturdays and I would always devour them instantly. This is was inspired me to create this new brand for New Town.
