Artisanat de Saba
Artisanat de Saba is a brand of Ethiopian artisanal products: oils, spices, tea, honey. It had to hold two promises at once, rarity and authenticity on one side, a quiet elegance on the other, without ever falling into decorative exoticism. The principle is set on the first page of the brand book: luxury and tradition are not opposites, they meet in selection, precision and sincerity.
- Client
- Artisanat de Saba
- Role
- Brand identity
- Year
- 2025
The original brief was about packaging. On opening the file, the existing logotype proved too weak to carry it: it lacked legibility and character, and dressing dozens of references with it would only have spread the problem. The studio therefore proposed widening the scope to the identity itself, rather than executing a brief whose limit it could see. It is a textbook case of what vdb creation often does: answer the brief that was set, and flag the one that should have been.
The name written in Amharic becomes the icon
The logotype pairs an elegant typeface with a symbol drawn from the Amharic alphabet. The icon is the joining of the two characters that read Saba: the brand's name written in the script of its own country, not an abstract shape loosely inspired by it. It can also be read as a dot, standing for the journey. Everything else follows the same logic of rootedness. The primary colour is warm and mineral, it evokes the soil; ten tertiary tones carry the real diversity of the range, leaves, seeds, bark, oils and natural pigments; and Lora, a classic, warm serif, carries the brand's steady voice. The ten tertiary tones find their use on the packaging, where each product family gets its own: the oil bottles, the spice and tea pouches, the honey. That is what tells one reference from another on a shelf without multiplying logos, and lets a new product be added later without reopening the guidelines. The shop window applies the same restraint: the mineral colour holds the background, the Amharic logotype stays the only sign, and the products do the rest of the work.
- Full brand identity modernisation
- Logotype and icon drawn from the Amharic alphabet
- Dozens of packaging designs, across every range
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Discovery
We start with a real conversation about your project: where it comes from, who it speaks to, what already exists around you. We analyse your competitors, because an identity that looks like the one next door will do nothing for you.
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Direction
We hand you our reading of the project: the structure we propose, the stages, what will need to be produced, and a first take on style through mood boards. The point is simple, making sure we are all looking the same way before anything gets created.
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Framing
Three genuinely different logo directions, which we then iterate on together. You watch the brand take shape and you decide while there is still room to change your mind.
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Production and delivery
The longest stage, paced by regular back and forth. At the end: the brand book as a PDF, every asset filed in a shared folder, source files on request, and a brand resource page of your own, a single address holding everything we have made together.