Khushi Kantha
Freelance work
The challenge
I was approached by an entrepreneur with extensive experience in the aid and humanitarian sector. She had started a venture that would provide jobs for vulnerable Bangladeshi women and needed a brand to help give the project a lift off the ground.
Khushi Kantha (or ‘Happy Blankets’) is a brand that makes handmade, multi-purpose baby blankets from materials diverted away from landfill or incineration. The traditionally stitched blankets are crafted by Bangladeshi women and sold in the UK, with proceeds going towards the women and reinvested back into the venture.
To begin crafting this brand, I started by researching the traditional kantha stitch and the Cox’s Bazar area of Bangladesh itself.
The response
I then worked to turn this into a visual language that could be used to create a monogram for the enterprise.
The resulting logo was then paired with a riotous colour palette that best reflected both Bangladeshi culture and the products themselves. Each of the colour pairings were given names after regions in Bangladesh, to help designers and other creatives work with them and provide ownership of the colour palette to the brand.
Examples were created of how this identity might then begin to translate into the physical space.
And the digital space, with social media pinpointed as a key area for the brand to begin developing reach and engagement.
The results
The process ran over the course of five weeks and, at the end of it, my client received a full set of brand guidelines to help them implement their newly created visual identity and start bringing the brand to life!
