Snake Oil Provisions

Snake Oil Provisions (SOP) is a specialized menswear boutique with a tightly edited selection of high-quality expertly-crafted goods and a deep personal connection to their customers. Founded in 2013, SOP has experienced rapid growth year after year and while the growth was incredible, it also led to some growing pains.

  • SOP’s brand identity consisted of a single logo and one color. It lacked a typographic system, color palette, guidelines, packaging, and other essentials for their growing business.
  • Their website experience was slow and outdated, making online shopping more difficult than it needed be.
  • They wanted to develop in-house products, but were uncertain how to go about it.

My goal: refresh and expand their brand so it better reflected SOP’s current position in the marketplace, while maintaining their scrappy meemaw & peepaw roots through an updated visual identity, packaging, product development, email marketing, and an entirely new Shopify experience from the ground up.

Scope

  • Logo, Typography, Color
  • Brand Guidelines
  • Shopify Website Design
  • Email Marketing
  • Packaging Design
  • Product Development
  • Brand Fragrance Development
  • Apparel Design
  • Promotional Merchandise
  • Environmental Design
Photography by

Logo System

After discovery we decided to keep the previous logo with some adjustments to make it more versatile. The original logo was challenging to fit into smaller vertical places, so I stacked the lettering and fine-tuned it to better fit the new orientation. To compliment the logo, I created a monogram style alternate that incorporated the new key icon that works well across a variety of platforms.

Mood Board

The rebrand was to coincide with SOP’s move from Long Beach, California to Los Angeles. Drawing inspiration from vintage L.A., rock ‘n roll, and Nicholas Winding Refn’s Drive, we worked closely together to incorporate the new aesthetic into the design of the buildout of the store.

Getting the Gold Right

The previous gold color was really more of a peach, so it was critical that we start there. Using the Pontiac GTO from Drive as inspiration, we gave the gold its proper muscle car glory.

Color Palette

With the GTO Gold decided upon, I added “Driver Pink” as an accent color to evoke neon city nights. Black was the only acceptable choice for backgrounds and for packaging details, the logos would appear in gold foil wherever possible.

Brand Guidelines

SOP’s previous brand iteration lacked any sort of brand guidelines, so I created a robust set of rules to accompany the identity. Brand guidelines are great for sending to vendors and contractors so there is no question how the brand should look and feel.

A selection of pages from the guidelines

Shopify Website Redesign

I redesigned SOP’s website to make it more user friendly, improve site speed by 300%, streamline the shopping cart and checkout process, greatly improve mobile UI/UX and performance, establish clear CTAs, logically restructure locations of products, and ensure full accessibility compliance.

The work resulted in an increase in conversions, dramatically faster checkout times, fewer abandoned carts, and higher user satisfaction.

Two images comparing before and after mobile home page
Two images comparing before and after mobile New Arrivals page

Marketing Email Redesign

I totally revamped SOP’s weekly marketing email to have a clearer CTA’s, be more modular, versatile, and to reflect the updated branding. Over six months they saw the click-through rate increase an average of 0.96%.

Brand Assets

After the brand identity was well defined, it was time to execute it across a wide variety of assets.

Custom Candles

SOP expressed interest in creating their very own apothecary line and we were able to accomodate. I developed nine fragrances that could be applied to all manner of home and body products. Luxury hand-crafted candles were created first. They feature ethically sourced wax, glass vessels and real wooden wicks. Each candle arrives in custom boutique packaging.

Custom Candles

SOP expressed interest in creating their very own apothecary line and we were able to accomodate. I developed nine fragrances that could be applied to all manner of home and body products. Luxury hand-crafted candles were created first. They feature ethically sourced wax, glass vessels and real wooden wicks. Each candle arrives in custom boutique packaging.

Custom Soap

To compliment the candles, I developed luxury hand-crafted moisturizing bar soap made from premium ethically sourced & sustainable ingredients. Each soap is individually wrapped in custom recyclable branded packaging.