Sometimes the Small Stuff Is the Good Stuff

Not every project needs a national rollout, a tradeshow booth, or a stakeholder alignment workshop. Sometimes the work is a ski patch. Or a honey label. Or a croquet club emblem that accidentally turns into merch. We love those projects just as much. Because while a lot of our work lives in big industries, associations, infrastructure, agriculture, and large-scale communications systems, we’ve always believed branding works best when it means something to the people actually using it.

Sometimes that audience is 100,000 producers. Sometimes it’s 40 women skiing together every Tuesday at Eldora. A few recent favorites:

The Eldora Ladies Ski Club Patch

A small embroidery patch built to create pride, identity, and community around a women’s ski group that simply wanted something fun to rally around. Aprés Gold. Black Diamond Pink. Powder Blue. A little playful. A little nostalgic. Way cooler than another group text. The kind of thing people put on jackets and actually keep for years.

Electric Honey

A naming and label system for small-batch honey produced in Boulder County. While this started as a few labels, it quickly turned into stickers, apiary signage, packaging ideas, and an entire tiny world we got weirdly invested in. There’s something really satisfying about branding a product you can literally hand to someone across a kitchen counter.

Fox Lane Croquet Club

Originally designed for a 70th birthday invitation for a serious croquet enthusiast and his family. Then it became hats. Then signage. Then shirts. Then actual club gear. Which is kind of how the best identity systems happen: people like them enough to keep using them.

These projects won’t become giant case studies. But they remind us of something important: branding doesn’t need to be massive to matter. Sometimes the best projects are just helping people feel connected to something they already love. A place. A hobby. A tradition. A weird little club. A Tuesday ski crew. That stuff counts too. Working on smaller passion projects alongside larger strategic work keeps us creative in a completely different way. Still high standards. Just slightly more likely to involve honey tasting or après-ski beer.

Good branding creates belonging. Doesn’t matter whether it’s for a national organization or a croquet club with unexpectedly strong merch sales. If people are proud to wear it, share it, stick it on something, or hand it to a friend, the brand is doing its job.

Got a passion project, side idea, weird club, small product, or thing people care deeply about?

→ We’re into those too.