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Posman Green

Animation of the Posman Books logo build, from wordmark to monogram to glasses to a playful arrangement of colorful circles — retail brand identity by Beardwood

beardwood-posman-books-logo-animation

Brand Positioning

Visual Identity

Consumer Research

Retail Experience Design

Brand Guidelines

Posman Books had one thriving NYC store and one failed location they'd just shut down. When new leadership decided to go national, they had to figure out if the magic could travel.

The magic? It was in the chaos all along. Walk into most bookstores, and you get calm, organized, and intellectual. Walk into Posman, and you get bright green walls, music playing, books stacked in tall piles, and mystery buys wrapped in brown paper. No section signage. Chaos that feels right. The failed store had tried to look legitimate. They'd suppressed the chaos and killed what made it work.

Posman Books

Modernize an icon. Elevate the experience.

Project - Yankee Candle

Brand Design

Packaging Design

Structural Design

Art Direction

Customer Insights

Naming

Yankee Candle created the home fragrance category fifty years ago. Today, younger consumers love the product but see the packaging as their mother's bathroom. Next to minimalist competitors, the apothecary jar looked dated, but generations recognize that silhouette. You don’t touch it.

We went after the label instead. The old label was small and cluttered. We made it larger and bolder with fragrance-first imagery that fills the space and stops you at the shelf. The jar stayed, everything else transformed.

Yankee Candle

Mergers fade. New eras launch.

Project - Posman Books

01_Magnera_logo

Linguistics Research

Tagline

Key Messaging

Logo

Two B2B materials companies were merging: Berry's Health, Hygiene and Specialties business plus Glatfelter. They needed a name, positioning, and visual identity for the combined entity, and they had two months.

Customer interviews revealed the risk. People had seen mergers before and expected bureaucracy, slowdowns, and good ideas buried in closets. "More of the same...more like an acquisition." What they hoped for was different: calculated boldness, broader thinking, and a company that could lift its gaze and look further out. The opportunity was real, but only if the new brand broke the pattern from day one.

Magnera

Started a revolution. Then revolutionized ourselves.

Consumer Insights

Ethnography

 Trend Forecasting

Innovation Strategy

Product Pipeline

Design Direction

S'well had one iconic product: the bottle featured in the MoMA Design Store. Seasonal drops of new colors and patterns kept excitement high, but competitors and knock-offs were closing in. The brand needed to grow beyond the original without diluting what made it special.

Through ethnographies, we found something the brand hadn't fully seen. Fans bought S'well for style; function came second. They discovered the leak-proof, condensation-proof, and temperature performance after the purchase. And once they did, they wanted that experience everywhere: entertaining, meal prep, food on the go. The whole family, including pets.

S’well

Break the rules. Build on the equity.

Corona Sunbrew

Brand Packaging

Brand World

Design Architecture

Gen Z drinkers were already hacking Corona with fruit. Corona saw the opportunity: give them a citrus beer built for it. The insight was obvious. Making it unmistakable on shelf? That took guts. How do you signal "this Corona is different" without losing the brand equity that made people want to hack it in the first place?

Most beer packaging whispers flavor: a subtle fruit illustration, a color shift. We screamed it: Mexican street art that explodes across the bottom of the bottle while the Corona crown holds its own at the top. Raw, textured citrus renderings make flavor intensity impossible to miss. The design was built to create a three-foot flavor wall that stops you mid-stride.

Made for gyms. Designed for appetites.

Brand Strategy

Package Design

Logo Redesign

Visual Identity System

Photography Direction

Pure Protein invented the protein bar in 1995. By 2022, the packaging looked like it. Quest, RXBar, ONE…the competitors had all modernized. Pure Protein looked like something your dad kept in his gym bag.

Here's what made it worse: even loyal customers admitted the brand looked dated and medicinal. The bars tasted great, but the packaging didn't tell anyone that.

Consumer research found the obvious-in-hindsight insight. In a category where every brand screams protein grams and macro counts, "tastes great" is actually the #1 purchase driver. Pure Protein's old packaging scored 23% on taste communication. Twenty-three percent. For a product people genuinely love eating.

Pure Protein

Inspiring American homes. Solving decor anxiety.

Insights & Ethnography

Brand Voice & Iconic Actions

Brand Book

Aesthetic Pillars

Organizational Training

Pottery Barn defined American home décor for decades. Then it became synonymous with something it never intended: bland beige sofas and aspirational rooms that bored people instead of inspiring them. Affordable alternatives were everywhere. Pottery Barn was losing relevance.

The research revealed something unexpected: people didn't lack taste, they lacked confidence. They wanted beautiful, unique homes, but decorating paralyzed them. What they needed was someone to meet them where they actually lived, with real-life solutions that made sense for real rooms, real budgets, and real lives.

© Beardwood 2026

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