Codesign - Room to Play, by Design

Smartsters is a furniture & decor brand for kids, founded by Think9—a platform to create digital-first brands for Indian consumers. The conception of the brand was driven by a gap in the market for well-designed, affordable products for children’s spaces, and the founding team’s motivation to create meaningful products that aid emotional, physical and cognitive development in childhood.

Our partnership with Smartsters brings alive a fresh & endearing language for the brand, that stands out in a segment teeming with gender-coded and over-decorated aesthetics—and celebrates childhood as a space to grow freely. With a simple but strategically designed toolkit, the identity system provides multiple solutions for the dynamic demands of direct-to-consumer experiences.

Scope

Brand Identity Design

Codesign has been instrumental in shaping Smartsters, when we were just an idea. They intuitively understood the brand and played a vital role in its zero to one journey. We engaged not only to achieve a brand identity system that was designed for the digital consumer but also more holistically to get the principles of the product design in place. —Ashni Biyani, Founder, Think9

Simple by Design

The Smartsters identity system does more with less to establish Brand Resonance, Expressiveness, Recall & Differentiation—by design. Here’s how:

Brand Resonance: The identity system reflects the brand’s commitment to creating environments which foster creativity & exploration, by providing a canvas that is not ‘over-branded’ but encourages expression and has literal room to grow.

Brand Expressiveness: The primary brand asset Spot, is more than a logo—always on the move, designed to interact with, and bring to life content. Spot adapts effortlessly, changes form, size and character, so every instance of usage, whether it’s a tiny icon, a massive billboard or a furniture detail is expressive and feels unmistakably Smartsters.

Brand Recall: With a small set of brand assets, and continuous reinforcement in applications, brand recall is simple and strong. This is especially critical for the D2C boom, where consumers are constantly bombarded with content, and brands are competing across segments for eyeballs.

Brand Differentiation: While most child-focussed brands employ multi-coloured, often gender-coded and popular character-based schematics in their design language, the conscious restraint of the identity makes brand touchpoints stand apart, and allow focus on messaging and product design.