Papier is a brand that's been creating stationery since 2015. Their products feed curiosity and contemplation through their gorgeous designs and endless blank pages. In addition, the brand strives to create products that are environmentally friendly through sustainably sourced materials and recyclable packaging.
And, recently, Papier went through a rebranding to further and better speak to the 1 million customers that it's had over the years. To stay relevant, the rebrand focuses on why stationery is essential, how it creates order, and what magic is behind it. The result is whimsical products, patterns, and elements to the branding system.
Before answering the question of why Papier rebranded, I want to share my perspective on what a brand is and what it means. Simply put, a brand is the external manifestation of a group of people’s shared principles, beliefs and perspectives. It embodies their ideas, speaks their language and reflects their tastes. For consumer brands, these groups of people are their customers.
When I founded the Papier brand in 2015 out of a small shared office in Soho I didn’t have customers. What my team and I did have however was an intuitive sense of who our customers would be and who we were building the brand for. With that in mind, brick by brick, brush stroke by brush stroke, page by page we built the Papier brand.
Fast forward 6 years, and the Papier community of paper people has grown to over 1 million customers across the UK and US and continues to double in size every year. 90% of our customers identify Papier “as a brand for people like me”. It’s fair to say that the brand we built in that small room in Soho, struck a chord.
And so you’d be justified in asking the question, why rebrand? Why go back to the drawing board and take a hammer and chisel to something that works?
The answer is that great brands need to constantly evolve to remain relevant, and that requires courage and conviction. Papier’s community has grown from a handful of likeminded souls in Soho to over a million paper people all over the world. The brand needed to hear this orchestra of new voices and ensure it continues to speak their shared language.
At the heart of the new Papier brand is a clear understanding of what stationery means to us. That it is more than just ornament. At its best, stationery is a space to become, creates order from chaos. It allows us to understand ourselves and show ourselves. It does more than sit pretty, it invites magic.How the Papier brand looks and sounds will change as we roll out our new visual and verbal identity across our website, marketing and products. Our colour palette, art direction, typography and yes our logo have all been refreshed. But what won’t change is how Papier feels and what it means to all of you who have been a part of this brand since day one.
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