Challenge

An Upper East Side temple to luxury foods since 1915, Butterfield Market is a family-owned retail grocery famous for its superior quality food and outstanding customer service. With the addition of a new catering division, they needed guidance in creating a scaleable, cohesive identity to facilitate the projected growth of the enterprise from a localized phenomenon to a widely recognized brand, with the potential to go national.

Action

Our core strategy was to capitalize on the store’s two main assets: its long history as a neighborhood institution and its close relationships with a loyal clientele. Because its devotion to personal service gives Butterfield an advantage over competing supermarket chains, we focused on expressing the store’s unique personality throughout its communications platform. We developed a visual language that embraced the client’s history and embodied its eclectic nature, including a distinctive typographic system, an iconic monogram, and engraved illustrations. Details like the abbreviation of the street name to the colloquial “Lex” reaffirm its New York character, while extensive window graphics tempt passersby to enter.

Results

Butterfield’s rebrand has given them valuable exposure and allowed them to expand their business to new ventures, including a popular catering service, a new gourmet kitchen, a presence in Grand Central’s food court, as well as serving from several Manhattan food carts.

Recognition