Gift Shop Logo for Curious Experience

Curious Experience is a retail store that combines eclectic products from around the world with an interactive digital experience that brings the store to life. They sell a carefully curated collection of gifts, home décor, art, and clothing that has a unique story to share. By marrying interactive technology with their store displays and the flow of new products, the store creates an experience that’s different every time.

Owner Brianne Osowski’s vision was to create a space that rekindled the joy we feel when discovering and experiencing something new. She came to us for help creating a brand that would bridge her brick-and-mortar store to her e-commerce website, and vice-versa, all while inspiring a sense of adventure and curiosity in her customers.

Curious Experience Gift Shop Logo Design

Meg worked on the designs for Curious’s new identity, starting with the logo. When asked what she envisioned, Brianne said:

I LOVE LOVE LOVE full blasts of color (or simple hints) when it is done right. Otherwise I default to black and white. This brand needs some personality.

Working on logo designs for brick-and-mortar stores often means taking into account things like printing costs (which can be more expensive the more color you use), and how the design will be integrated into both your interior and exterior spaces. For example, the signage throughout the strip mall where Brianne’s store is located required horizontal signage with specific measurements. Meg began with logo concepts that explored different typography treatments combined with elements of quirkiness, bursts of color, and twists on the normally expected, all while focusing on a design that was horizontal in nature.

She and Brianne also brainstormed color concepts that would work well printed on signage, business cards, flyers, and postcards while complementing the layout and color schemes of the store’s interior. “The important thing is to create a cohesive brand appearance that blends well with the brick-and-mortar store,” Meg noted. The initial concepts spanned a spectrum of clean and minimal to fun and playful.

After a few tweaks and revisions, Meg narrowed down Brianne’s vision to two aesthetic elements: hand-drawn and very bold & modern. She created a logo that embraces the store’s philosophy to look at the world from different angles:

Curious Experience Website Design

Thrilled with the new logo, Brianne was ready to move on to site design. She expressed a desire for a short and sweet homepage that quickly conveys what Curious is all about, but that doesn’t make the store feel small. Meg’s initial homepage design fused the brand’s personality with a fun and simple-to-navigate shopping experience:

My main goal was to keep your content well organized and clean while keeping a lot of the colorful quirkiness that makes Curious so special. It’s important that this shop looks like more than just a mom and pop shop but still has an intimate feeling.

It was love at first site (wink, wink)! Brianne said she was speechless and took a couple of days to let the giddiness settle so she could comment on minor tweaks, like changes to the site’s graphical elements, footer, and promos section.

Then she took some time to think about user experience. For customers, she wanted to make sure visitors could shop easily between categories, and view several products at once. To that end, Jon, our developer, implemented infinite scroll on all category pages to make shopping more seamless. Fewer clicks (typically) means higher sales, which is always a good thing!

Brianne also wanted the flexibility to add, remove and change product categories as her store evolved and they began offering new products. Fortunately, all Aeolidia designs are done in a way in which site owners can add or remove pages and categories on their own with little impact to the design and functionality.

You can see the final site design and Curious’s beautiful storefront signage below. Doesn’t it make you want to wander in and see what you find?

Ready to bring your brand’s identity to life?

Our designers have created countless logos and shopping experiences that burst with personality both online and in person. Contact us to begin making the store of your wildest, quirkiest dreams a reality.