Branding Case Study

Every Red Kite project starts with a deep dive, and The Houndry’s came before the fit-out had even begun. There was no existing brand to work around, no website and no shopfront. Just a name, a lease in Fortitude Valley and a very clear idea of the gap Erin was setting out to fill.

We worked through the services, the inner-city audience and the competitors she wanted to leave behind, along with the London dog club that had shaped her thinking. What came back was consistent. Premium, tech-led and transparent, closer to a members’ club than a kennel, and built for people who treat their dog as part of their lifestyle.

• Brand ambitions
• Target audience
• Competitive landscape
• Service offering
• Points of difference
• Signage & environment
• Merchandise & apparel
• Tone & personality
• Design requirements
• & more

The things she ruled out mattered just as much. No paw prints, no cartoon dogs, no smiling puppies, nothing bright and playful. That gave us the tension the whole identity runs on, warm and witty on one side, confident and urban on the other.

The wordmark is a customised Bebas Neue Pro Bold, redrawn for a more even rhythm, with Galano Grotesque Heavy on the word “The” to soften the lockup. The dog is drawn into the identity rather than dropped beside it, a hand-drawn head paired with the name and a tail curling out of the R. It reads as a dog straight away without a single paw print, and it holds up at report card size as well as it does lit up on a facade. From there we built out the full family, vertical and horizontal lockups, a standalone dog head, the R mark on its own, inverted versions and monochrome silhouettes, so the brand has an answer for every surface it lands on.

A logo on its own was never going to carry a brand this ambitious, so we built a full visual system around it. The illustrations are loose, single-weight and deliberately imperfect, dogs being dogs rather than dogs behaving. The icon set follows the same rule, no harsh edges and no perfect symmetry, and a circular badge version turns that linework into a way of signposting daycare, grooming, training and the taxi run.

The palette does the heavy lifting. Aqua Deep and Woodsmoke ground the layouts, Celery and Early Dawn open them up, and Violet Red and Wewak supply the punch. Bebas Neue carries the headlines, Plus Jakarta Sans handles the reading, and Amithen comes in as a brush accent on the words worth emphasising.

The photography treatment pushes it furthest. Every hero image is a black and white dog portrait layered with torn paper, halftone, pencil scribbles, paint splashes and muddy paw prints, all in brand colour. It’s the piece that makes The Houndry look like street art rather than signage, and it’s the reason the brand holds attention on a feed.

A business that hasn’t opened yet has to look established from its very first post, so we built the everyday pieces alongside the identity. A social media kit with page design and post templates, service report cards that staff fill in by hand and give back to owners after a daycare day or an adventure outing, apparel for the team, and a promo poster for the local park.

• Social media page design
• Social post templates
• Service report cards
• Editable Canva templates
• Staff apparel
• Park promo poster
• Local mail drop flyers

Everything print-ready came with an editable Canva version, so The Houndry can add a service or change a date without coming back to us. That was deliberate. Erin is building a business, not managing a design queue, and the brand needed to work in her hands as well as ours.

The building gave us two facades, one on Water Street and one on Brunswick Street, both facing traffic heading into the city. We designed for both, with an illuminated logo sign for the frontage, a neon piece for reception and large-format brand artwork across the grey panels, so the building reads as The Houndry long before anyone reaches the door.

• Building facade artwork
• Illuminated shopfront signage
• Reception neon signage
• Vehicle magnets
• Full van wrap
• Print-ready wrap artwork

The taxi service got the same treatment. We started with magnets for the original van, then designed a full wrap for the VW ID Buzz Cargo that replaced it, mapped panel by panel around the sliding doors and the rear. It’s the part of the brand that moves through the suburb every day, so it had to look deliberate from every angle.

The Houndry needed to be findable months before the facility was finished, so we split the job. First came a landing page marketing the dog walking, adventure outings and house call services Erin was already running, enough to start building a local customer base while the fit-out carried on.

We mapped the pages out as a wireframe with Erin, worked through her comments, then designed and built it to go live before the holidays. We also introduced her to our hosting partner and handled the domain move, so she had one less set of accounts to wrangle while opening a business.

The full site followed on the same brand system, carrying the daycare, grooming, training and membership services as they came online, with the booking flow designed to sit alongside them.