Upparel: The Most Sustainable Socks Brand

After being blown away by the amount of textile waste and pivoting to a D2C textile recycling scheme, our client came to us with a new name and the idea of rebranding to reflect their new direction and journey thus far. An ambitious client with the future in mind, the challenge was building an exceptional brand that broke out of the clutter whilst leveraging brand assets to enable growth. Knowing their success would largely depend on partnerships, we had to be instrumental in building a brand with strong co-branding capabilities, adaptability and versatility.

UPPAREL is dynamic and impactful, shown in their bold and bright brand. We developed the idea of "hitting the pause button" to take a moment to examine our consumerism habits and reinvent the system. We incorporated the pause icon into the main design of the logo and utilised bold, large shapes into the brand elements adding versatility and ease of use across a range of applications. The brand aligns with and represents the style of UPPAREL's innerwear products, and has been successfully adapted to various applications including a pop-up store and kids flip out sofa named FlipUP™.

The new brand has been significant in the successful growth of UPPAREL. Its bold and impactful design has created a new market leader in sustainable textiles and help to secure over 200 partnerships. Since launching, UPPAREL has saved 2.1 million items, achieved a 10:1 ratio of items diverted to items produced, prevented 1.1 million kg of greenhouse gases from polluting our atmosphere, and diverted over 280,000 kg of waste from landfill. The brand has helped turn a vision into a pioneering business that is stepping up and leading the change for future generations.

The UPPAREL scope spanned everything from the logo, brand identity, style guide, iconography, packaging, website, social media kit, and business cards. Immersing ourselves in sustainability and the circular economy, we were inspired by UPPAREL's vision. Our mission was to build a brand that evoked emotion in customers, built a connection and inspired the need to make a change in consumer behaviour whilst leading the change against textile waste. The WHY was always at the forefront of our minds throughout the entire branding process. Every decision aligned with the brand's purpose to encourage the audience to feel good about doing good. The solution required a logo that is recognisable and sustainable. For this, we went with an approach to have the logo element as a hero and we have repurposed its components to create different patterns, shapes, sizes and more. The logo was designed to work perfectly in black and white so it can work easily with any other brand, we then introduced a fresh set of secondary colours to create a flexible and dynamic brand.