Klipsta

Carry your hat hands-free with Klipsta Hat Clips

Brief & Direction

Klipsta’s big picture plan is to create innovative, time-saving solutions, helping families solve small frustrations in their daily life. The brand was using its unique magnetic hat clip as a platform to launch as a single product business.

Kelly - the owner (also one of the loveliest and most genuine people you will ever meet) got in touch with us before the business has launched. She was about to start production and needed help with correctly positioning the brand and creating visual assets to use on products during the production.

Since Klipsta hat clip is a new product concept, it was extremely important to find the right way to position it. It was imperative that all the brand assets do a great job explaining the nature of the brand and all of the product usages. We needed to create a brand that’s very functional but also aspirational. The task at hand was communicating Klipsta’s problem-solving brand story while elevating its products from useful tools to something the target market simply wants to own.

We knew how much time and passion Kelly had poured into product creation. Our work needed to match this with a design that helps her sell it to the world

Create a brand that will help Klipsta launch as a single, very unique product but also allow the business to grow in the future with a variety of time-saving solutions.

The users of this product are families with mums as the purchase/decision-maker. We spent time getting to know Klipsta’s target market and the space on the market it was joining. Klipsta Hat is a very unique product, but while it had been patented, there was a danger of potential future copycats. It was important to find a way to connect with the potential customers on a more emotional level to build brand loyalty. 

The Strategy

Together with Kelly, we decided to focus on women, predominantly mums who spend half of their time looking after everyone around them and organizing things for their families, while trying to keep it together. We knew that Klipsta would help sort out some of the little frustrations, not necessarily changing their life but definitely making it just that little bit easier. We wanted to create a brand that wasn’t claiming to be a hero but instead understood women and gave them a helping hand, removing some of their very annoying problems (such as a school hat missing yet again…).

Since the Klipsta brand had to be engaging as a single offering while also allowing for soon-to-come multiple products, we looked at the things the company was planning to bring out in the future. We established a common link between all the products - as those that hold things together. From this we derived the ‘Keep it together’ brand idea.

Keep it together! 

A simple play on words that combines the product function (keeping the hat connected to your bag) and how it will help its user in a more abstract way. Klipsta will help you keep it together by reducing annoying moments (such as coming home on a busy day and realizing that you left your hat in a cafe) when you are ready to lose it.

The Creative

We started by creating a logo using bespoke lettering, with characters - ‘L’ and ‘I’ shaped to create brackets - a graphic symbol of holding things together. Those brackets then became an icon used to highlight bits of photography and illustrations. We further utilised this element creating a branded pattern used on the packaging.

Since Klipsta is a fun, everyday and approachable brand, we chose to use a gender neutral colour palette, modern, simple but friendly-looking fonts and simple flat vector illustrations to demonstrate product features and various ways of using it. The photography style is light, natural, aspirational but approachable and friendly. We wanted Klipsta’s customers to feel invited and not intimidated by it - and chose to stay away from unachievable perfection.   

During the initial product launch getting the packaging design right was really important since we knew that once in shops there won’t be anyone around to explain the product use to the potential buyers. This little packaging had to do some serious heavy lifting! We opted on a heroeing simple vector style illustration of the product in use and a larger short sentence of one of Klipsta Hat’s main benefits - ‘Carry your hat hands-free’.

Now, after 2 years on the market as Klipsta grows in popularity its stockists moved from gift stores and newsagent to more premium fashion based ones. Having the product displayed in use by most of the retailers meant that the packaging requirements have changed.

With this in mind we created new, more paired back look that focuses on growing brand recognition and communicating the different product variants.

To make sure that the brand truly connects with the target audience it was imperative that the way it communicates feels right. We chose a down to earth, simple and personable tone of voice. We wanted the consumers to feel like they are reading something their friend would write.

The ‘Keep it together’ strapline was also fun to work with, easily spilling onto other areas of communication.

Keep it simple; Keep smiling and Keep in touch being just some examples of it. Our copywriting expert did a great job creating copy to complement this down to earth, friendly brand.