Chocxo
Year: 2021
Firm: Operatic Agency
Role: Creative director, brand strategist, designer
Involvement: Brand strategy/platform, brand identity, copywriting, e-comm website design/build, illustration, social media, marketing campaign
Team: Rony Mikhael (creative direction, strategy), Sean Siford (strategy, copy), Valeriia Timets (web developer), Amna Khalid (account supervisor)
Chocxo is a chocolate company that manufactures clean, “Better for You” snacks, made with high-quality dark chocolate. Their products are organic, keto, gluten-free, and kosher certified—and they’re committed to not compromising on taste.
Diving into the world of chocolate, we began by understanding what this delicious industry was like: what their competitors were doing, what Chocxo had done historically, who was eating their snacks and what they thought of it. We defined what truly differentiated them in this crowded market and worked to establish a visual language that stood out on the shelf and made passersby salivate enough to grab some.
After having run a number of workshops with the founder and his team, we came to learn that this company was founded on generations of confectionery passion. “Chocolate,” as the founder put it, “runs through my veins.”
With this, we determined that this chocolate was not only functional, but artisanal as well. Its success relied on delivering a product that was conscious of their health-conscious consumers’ needs and indulgent desires. Thus emerged the platform we developed: simple and artisanal. Simple ingredients make for a simple decision to indulge in this superior chocolate birthed out of generations of the craft.
We built an entire brand platform off of this concept and defined the brand’s narrative, purpose, personality, and personas off of it. This then informed an identity system that would be flexible enough to translate online and off. We reenvisioned and crafted a new logo from scratch, completely revamped their packaging design, and built out a brand guideline to direct how to express their visual language (typography, photography, tone-of-voice, illustration, colour, and the like). We developed and design a suite of illustrations whose style offered a kinetic representation of each products inclusions, the illustrations conveying a sense of movement and dynamism on pack.
Having assembled a team with a healthy cumulative experience in the e-commerce space, we designed and built a Shopify website that took them beyond the four walls of their distributors and to the masses. Even still, seeing the end product on the shelves at Walmart, Shoppers, and Costco is pretty…sweet.
