Boosting Simón Coll's Brand Image
Redefinition of the role and territory of a brand of chocolate with a long history and application of the new strategic platform to its visual identity and to its restructured product range.
Full development. Concept and brand narrative, brand identity design, stationery, brand brochure, packaging for line of chocolate bars, product catalogue.
WELL-DESERVED ASCENT
With 170 years of experience manufacturing chocolate from cocoa beans to chocolate bars and deep-rooted criteria as an expert in its field, SIMÓN COLL produces chocolate with a distinctive, personal flavour. All in all, a project with a clear strategy: to do the brand justice, to make SIMÓN COLL finally look like what it really is.
The brand had previously kept a low profile. Its more popular products could do well on their own, almost without brand support. They seemed not to need to be marketed specially in a distribution channel, pastry shops and confectionery outlets, where the brand-customer relationship is often regarded as the link between supplier and retailer rather than with the end consumer.
Brand transparency is always a serious constraint in the success of any initiative, not to mention that it exposes the company to a permanently weak competitive position. However, there was nothing unsubstantial behind the SIMÓN COLL brand. On the contrary, its history and present status contributed to build a relevant brand for both distribution channels and consumers; a brand with an age-old mastery in each and every aspect of the alluring world of chocolate.
In the first place, a new strategic platform was proposed and agreed on, thus defining the SIMÓN COLL brand and territory. The visual consequences of this new strategy began with a new brand identity design and new packaging for its extensive line of chocolate bars, which is the product line with maximum exposure to consumers.
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Simón Coll Brand
Over 170 years the brand's visual identity had gone through all kinds of evolutions and regressions. The previous design consisted of the name in an italic typography with script capitals, which was not perfectly legible. The brand name was sometimes associated with an old illustration of a sailboat. This sailboat, in a rather coarse drawing and often just a sketch, was evocative of the Atlantic voyage raw materials like cocoa had to take in the 19th century.
The traditional and expert dimensions of the brand were values that could be enhanced in order to convey a higher perception of quality. But basically because they correspond to a bare fact to be capitalized on: the company continues to produce chocolate using to its own traditional methods, importing cocoa beans and roasting them in a unique way that gives its chocolate special flavour. The sailboat stood for this continuity. SIMÓN COLL had to appear, as was its right, as a genuine chocolate maker and this is expressed through the description "Xocolaters" in the brand's base line. The use of Catalan reveals the brand roots as well.
Changing the typography to capitals recovered the original style of the brand and greatly improved legibility. The cleaner and more important presence of the brand allowed us to add elements showing its values and to include a new version of the SIMÓN COLL sailboat illustration as a watermark.
This execution is part of the global project SIMÓN COLL.
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Chocolate Bars Mould
Having updated the brand and the design in the wrappers of Simón Coll chocolate bars, the task remained of personalising the bars themselves, which had been anonymous up to that point. In addition to this first aim, changing the mould of a chocolate bar involved adjusting the portion of consumption, although we had to maintain its overall dimensions and total weight.
This was therefore compensated according to the thicknesses and the reliefs in the chocolate, aspects which would be defined by the volumetric design of the bar. Being very easy to shape, the fine granulometry of our chocolate enabled very delicate lines to be reproduced in the mould. The new design of the bar identifies the surface of each portion with the brand, while the depth of the groove that surrounds it makes it easy to break off.
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Simón Coll Sailboat Range Catalogue
SIMÓN COLL’s sailboat range is made up of all its chocolate bars plus the Spanish style "chocolate a la taza", and the drinking cocoa powder. As brand image material, the catalogue follows the visual guidelines defined for SIMÓN COLL. It conveys an elegant simplicity, focusing on showing the product images and their practical information in a clean and organized way. Touch provides added value through quality paper and print finishings, such as the stamping and embossing on the cover.
This execution is part of the global project SIMÓN COLL.
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Simón Coll Brand Brochure
An element of the new positioning for Chocolates SIMÓN COLL, the brand brochure literally and visually expresses this, emphasising the brand's more than 170 years of experience.
For this purpose, full texts were written, classified in sections and illustrated with images. Just as with its complementary document, the product catalogue, the brand brochure sticks to the same design features and a completely coherent perception with the rest of the design projects that have been developed for SIMÓN COLL: the brand's corporate identity and packaging for its line of chocolate bars.
This execution is part of the global project SIMÓN COLL.
Chocolates for kids
This set consists of small chocolate gifts to give away occasionally to children or in birthday parties. The illustrations adapt to different article proposals and formats such as the pencil boxes or the traditional small chocolate bars.
Easter Chocolates: Decorate the egg
In the Easter tradition of giving chocolate eggs, in this case it is proposed that children decorate it with the chocolate dragées the box includes.
The whole surface of the box shows a very rich and imaginative illustration. In it some diligent bunnies, traditional characters of these holidays, teach them how to do it in a fantastic environment.
Cocoa powder hot drink
Unlike most bags of cocoa powder for serving in cups found in the Spanish market, this preparation of cocoa with cinnamon from Simón Coll is a more adult-oriented option. Containing more cocoa, it is less sweet and thick on the palate than the popular children's version. This distinction is reflected in the product's appearance, which underlines the connection with cocoa as the original material, with a striking vegetal illustration on the brand's own white background.
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New Simón Coll chocolate bars
In the redesign briefing, the image of each of the varieties had to be included in the packaging, which is why the picture of the small chocolate bars was added under the corresponding description. To ensure that Simón Coll's iconic sailboat did not lose its leading role when moving it from its previous central position to the bottom of the tablet, it was incorporated into a more evocative colour image, reminiscent of the sea voyages to the tropics to obtain cocoa beans.
Advent Calendar
Advent calendars are a classic that anticipate Christmas by involving children in the game of opening a window every day and discovering a surprise. In this case, it is a small chocolate bar that incorporates a small sticker in its wrap with an image that shows a funny variation with respect to the one on the window where it was found. Then, a reproduction of the entire illustration on the back of the calendar allows you to paste the stickers together, creating a scene with many different details from the initial image.
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Easter Chocolates: Dinosaur egg
No doubt: a big Easter egg is much more special if it's a dinosaur egg. So that the children who receive it not only enjoy eating it but also playing and learning, each egg contains a figure of a different dinosaur and inside each box they will find a Dino-guide with lots of information and a poster to colour in.
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Easter Chocolates: My first mona
An old Catalan tradition is that the godparents give the "mona" to their godchildren every Easter Monday. The "mona" can be a cake, a chocolate figures or all at once. In this case, it is a chocolate egg for the youngest godchildren, their first "mona", which also includes a plush teddy bear inside and a picture frame to keep a souvenir of the day.
Cacao a la taza preparation
A classic of family consumption, with the powdered preparation inside these bags you get a sweet and thick chocolate ideal for children to enjoy.
Winter chocolates
The Christmas-theme chocolate bars are supplemented by new themed illustrations, which can extend the temporary duration of this type of product to the whole winter season. The winter motif chosen for the three illustrations is one of snowmen, and maintains the line created for Simón Coll in all the previous productions, as regards always offering very attractive, high-quality production which transmits empathy and warmth.
Chocolate bars with flavours
A range of three tablets that offers the experience of pairing different ingredients with chocolate, raising its gastronomic value as a product. Three new chocolates that allow you to discover the freshness that brings the presence of sea salt or the citric and fruity notes of dehydrated pieces of natural orange or identify a cappuccino taste by joining 60% cocoa milk chocolate with ground natural coffee.
Small chocolate bars for adults
On second thought, it makes little sense to target the traditional small chocolate bars (30g) only at children, while a format like this for individual consumption on the go suits people of all types, including adults. Especially if they offer special chocolates like those in this range which incorporate cocoa nibs or different nuts. Adapting the image of the original tablets, these small chocolates are packed in flow-pack to preserve all their freshness.
A different Easter egg
If we like to participate in our traditions and we like chocolate, why in our annual appointment with the chocolate Easter eggs we only think about offering them to children? This is the idea behind this initiative by Simón Coll.
To make it come true, a good 70% cocoa chocolate is used, which fits better to an adult taste, and it is dressed with a look worthy of a gift to celebrate the new cycle of renewal that spring brings.
Chocolate sardines
A property of good chocolate is that, as it has a very fine texture, it allows the reproduction of tiny details in moulds of small objects. Thus these chocolates may get shapes and aspects as diverse as they are surprising. A classic among them are the chocolate sardines, which have now been renewed with a new metallic foil and which can be seen in a box looking as a traditional half-open tin.
Dinosaur Chocolate Bars
These six Simón Coll milk chocolate bars reproduce fun and colourful dinosaurs, indicating their name as well. The dinosaur issue is a children's favourite. Surely, among the many that attract your attention, dinosaurs are the only characters that are not just pure fantasy, which makes them even more intriguing and attractive.
Autumn chocolate bars
Autumn is the motif for this group of three Simón Coll milk chocolate bars. The colourful style of the illustrations, depicting three forest animals surrounded by natural motifs such as leaves and flowers, is as attractive to children as it is to their parents.
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Easter Chocolates
Easter is an important moment for the consumption of chocolate, specially in the form of figures of animals and eggs of different sizes. It is a tradition spread throughout Europe and particularly in Catalonia is very popular when these chocolate figures are incorporated into the "mones", which are cakes the godparents give their godchildren on Easter Monday. For decades Simon Coll has been specialized in the elaboration of these figures of chocolate when the season arrives, supplying them both to the pastry shops as well as to the food channel.
Simón Coll also strengthens its brand through these products, showing a visual quality that dignifies a deeply rooted, endearing celebration in which children are the absolute protagonists.
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Chocolate Bars with Whole Almonds
The chocolate bars with almonds - 50% chocolate and 70% cocoa and two milk chocolate formats - initially formed part of the common presentation of Simón Coll bars that reproduces the symbol of the brand, the ship that transported the cacao in the time when the brand was created (1840).
The redesign seeks to highlight products which coexisted too discretely with all the other bars. Products which are very highly valued due to the flavour provided by the quality of the almonds used - always from this country, whole and toasted every season - combined with the chocolate in the Simón Coll style, produced from cocoa beans which are toasted in two stages following a special process that enhances the flavour of the almonds.
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Home Baking Range
Bakery professionals have always had a range of products and formats which Simón Coll produces and markets according to their needs. The recent fondness for homemade pastries and for cooking which uses chocolate as an ingredient has boosted the demand for products that were previously restricted to the professional sphere. In their corner shops, consumers look for products to use in different ways - to melt for preparing sauces or bathing desserts, as chips to add when making homemade pastries, or for finishing off an ice cream with a topping of chocolate vermicelli or a tiramisu with powdered cacao.
This situation gives Simón Coll the opportunity to have a presence at points of sale where it is not normally found, making it known to a wider target audience as a traditional brand expert in chocolates, through more specialised cocoa products. The range, packaged in bags and canisters, includes a variety of chocolate types (according to the percentage of cacao, with milk, white, etc.) and in different forms (drops, vermicelli, powder, etc.).
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Drinking and Cooking Chocolate Bars
Dating back to the 1840 origins of this chocolate producer, the bar for making drinking chocolate is possibly Simón Coll’s most long-lasting product. Its image, which maintains the graphic style of the 19th century, has made it one of the brand’s iconic products.
The interest it arouses in consumers in both the domestic and export markets is supplemented by the growing importance of chocolate as a culinary ingredient. As a result of this, Simón Coll decided to complement the classic version with three new varieties for drinking or cooking. 60% cocoa and cinnamon, 60% cocoa and vanilla and 70% cocoa with chilli and pepper. Visually speaking, the breakdown of the flavours shares the historic monochrome appearance of the design of the original product by allocating a single distinctive colour to each variety in a wrapping whose background is in a much more tenuous tone of the same colour. A display box has also been designed for the three new products.
High Cocoa Content Bars
For a company backed up by 175 years of producing chocolate from the cocoa beans it selects and imports directly, offering chocolate bars with a high cacao content is today almost a requirement. The Simón Coll chocolate bar range - the one with the illustration of the sailing ship that transported the cocoa over the seas - ended up with a maximum of 70% cocoa. The new range now includes three new tablets, made up of 70% cococo with cacao nibs, 85% cocoa and 99% cocoa.
So that they could present a specific identity compared to the others, the three new varieties include illustrations based on cocoa - on its beans, on this tropical tree and on its leaves. Its colourful presence bursts out above and below a format which is kept vertical and shares the clean and qualitative elegance associated with the Simón Coll brand.
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Chocolate "Turrones"
"Turrones" (almond nougats) as well as chocolate “turrones” are one of the traditional foods eaten at Christmas in Spain. Simón Coll produces, only for the season, a number of types of chocolate “turrones” with different varieties and presentations geared towards either food stores or pastry shops and bakeries.
White folding boxes with a window showing the product variety were chosen for this range to be sold in pastry shops and bakeries. The result is a serious, high-quality appearance in line with the image expected of products sold through this distribution channel.
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Taps al Marc de Cava Truffles
It is not surprising that one of the traditional specialties of this century-old chocolate company based in Sant Sadurní d'Anoia, capital city of cava sparkling wine, is a marc de cava chocolate truffle. Like the "bouchons", a similar product from the region of Champagne, “Taps al Marc de Cava” are chocolates shaped like champagne corks. They are traditionally sold in a dark-green cava bottle with an opening in the bottom to remove the chocolates.
The result of their previous packaging (see image 3) was a product that, when placed on a store shelf, did not stand out at all from a real bottle of cava, going unnoticed except by those who were aware of this specialty. For this reason, when faced with imagery from the two categories of reference (cava and chocolate) in the redesign, we chose to tip the scales towards the latter.
The choice of a more selective bottle that stood out and was more transparent not only helped avoid any confusion but also allowed for a better view of the chocolates. In terms of graphics, the label design responds to an ornamental style while still maintaining the visual neatness that characterizes Simón Coll’s packaging. Both chocolate and cava references share values of tradition, wealth and celebration, as well as a particular graphic style that links the historic graphic code used for cavas and that of the most traditional chocolates. Often given as a gift, the Taps bottle is presented inside an elegant white cardboard box.
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Simón Coll 1880 Artwork
The SIMÓN COLL brand kept some of its more traditional chocolates in their original packaging dating back to the end of the 19th century. This is the case of, for instance, the thick bars of "chocolate a la piedra" (stone chocolate) also known as "chocolate a la taza" (chocolate by the cup), which evokes the origins of chocolate in Europe, when cocoa beans were ground on a stone, the Aztec "metate", and chocolate was consumed exclusively in drink form.
This old design features the illustration, appropriately naive, of the original SIMÓN COLL sailboat between two landscapes, with people ploughing a field and collecting sugar cane respectively, symbolizing both shores of the ocean. Once the brand had been redesigned and was ready to be applied to these products, we not only kept the historical pattern but also took the opportunity to make it more faithful to the original artwork.
This execution is part of the global project SIMÓN COLL.
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Simón Coll's Small Chocolate Bars
Scaling of the new chocolate-bar image to smaller formats, the 18g chocolate-bar line and the 5g "napolitanas" line. This small, square chocolate for coffee is the only format where the SIMÓN COLL brand logo is fully displayed, with the sailboat in the background as a watermark, following the corporate version.
This execution is part of the global project SIMÓN COLL.
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Simón Coll Chocolate Bars
Although the redesign of the SIMÓN COLL chocolate-bar line maintains the structural features of the previous packaging, the aim was to take a significant step forward in the brand's perceived value, a role this product range had to take on as the main public element of the renewed SIMÓN COLL, a brand dating back to 1840.
The types of chocolate, -50% cocoa, 70% cocoa, milk and white chocolates, chocolate with almonds, and sugar-free options-, had previously been codified using a different background colour for each bar. Now each variety is identified by a different coloured stripe. Visually, the rest of the packaging follows the brand architecture, using a high quality linear paper in white, the colour of the brand's most popular chocolate bar.
The colour stripe divides the space between the logo area and the new illustration of the sailboat below, which identifies the chocolate-bar line. With the restyling, the wrapping system for the whole formats range (200g, 85g and 18g) has been modified from the former folded paper sleeve to a one-piece wrapping.
The simple, clean lines of the packaging are enhanced with the use of embossed paper with the texts and the sailboat illustration printed in gray, reserving black only for the brand name.
This execution is part of the global project SIMÓN COLL.
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Simón Coll Tradition cup and saucer
This “mancerina”, the set including a "jícara" (chocolate cup) and its saucer, reproduces historic graphic motifs of the Simón Coll brand. The sailing ship harks back to the transport of cacao from the Americas and Africa around 1840, the time when the firm was founded, for the purpose of toasting the cacao beans and producing chocolate. This cup and saucer express the oldest way of taking chocolate in Europe, as a hot drink in a cup, well before solid chocolate was created. A drink with Aztec origins that the Spanish modified by adding sugar and serving it hot.
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Cocoa design cup and saucer
In addition to the set decorated with elements of the oldest graphic tradition of Simón Coll, a new model of mancerina (chocolate cup and saucer) has been designed reproducing the richness of the vegetal motifs around the cocoa tree, such as the large leaves, the multicoloured cocoa pods or the tiny flowers.
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Simón Coll's Cacao Nibs
In the technical language of the cocoa experts, the word "nibs" refers to sliced, toasted cocoa beans. Obtaining the cocoa nibs is one of the first stages of the chocolate-making process.
Being chocolate manufacturers from bean to bar, Chocolates Simon Coll decided to introduce an unprecedented product concept for its domestic market based on these cocoa nibs. This initiative perfectly highlights the company’s expertise obtained through their more than 170 years of experience. The marketing guidelines were to launch an adult chocolate snack, geared toward impulse purchases and individual consumption as it was packaged in small tins sold in display boxes. The target audience is adults that enjoy bitter dark chocolate because this is not your average chocolate. Although every little nib is covered in 70% dark chocolate, its crunchy core, the nib itself, is pure cocoa and thus quite bitter.
The consumer’s lack of previous references regarding the nature of this product led us to include educational elements in the packaging and display box design. The decoration around the small dispenser of cocoa nibs shows, with a level of detail of a botanical illustration, the branches of a cocoa tree with its pods. This attracts customers and demonstrates the visual quality necessary to entice them to try this product.
Simón Coll's Assorted Christmas Figurines
The impact of the characters on the individual wrappings is enhanced by the same images shown on the cardboard packaging that seals each bag. This product’s appeal and ability to awaken children’s imagination makes it stand out in this category in which, in general, not enough attention is given to design.
Having aroused the interest of many international distributors, more cardboard bag closers were created with new illustrations of different assortments of chocolate figurines.
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The Three Wise Men and Santa Claus chocolates
One of Simon Coll’s traditional products, this simple 18g chocolate bar, becomes the perfect seasonal item with just simple changes to the packaging design, attracting much more attention and making it a commercial success in any market.
For this reason, after the Three Wise Men came the more recognizable Santa Claus and, after Christmas, many other holidays that may provide an unexpected sales boost for Simón Coll’s high-quality milk chocolate bars.
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Simón Coll's Three Wise Men and Santa Claus
One of Simon Coll’s traditional specialties is making foil-wrapped chocolate figurines, which are purchased at Christmas as gifts for children or used to decorate the Christmas tree. In line with all the work previously done for the brand, the goal was to revalue a very good chocolate product aimed at children, avoiding the banal appearance and carelessness that usually prevails in this product category and making it attractive to adult buyers as well.
By updating the decorated foil wrapping, we were able to connect with contemporary tastes and put these wrappings on par with the quality and expressiveness of images, for instance, in the present-day illustrated children's books. The excellent reception these received when presented at international fairs led to the creation of new assortments based on drawings of Santa Claus and the Three Wise Men.