Mi Tienda de Arte

A new niche brand that reclaims error

During the initial phase of our work with Mi tienda de arte we sought for their brands to be a driver of business growth. To achieve this, we reached several conclusions. One of them was that differences between their audiences stemmed less from nationality than from shared interests and concerns. This meant we had to sophisticate their architecture by introducing differentiated international niche brands capable of connecting with them—not just to offer products, but to create experiences and build communities around art and crafts.

The community centered on fine arts, therefore, needed its own brand. In today's case study we walk you through the birth of a brand from scratch—from understanding the landscape to every last element that would shape its identity. All of it, always, guided and defined by brand strategy.

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A SECTOR DEFINED BY NEUTRALITY

During the immersion we encountered the prevailing reality among brands offering this type of product: neutral approaches, often stripped of emotion and lacking concrete narratives, targeting audiences far more heterogeneous in age, gender, and interests than what existed within the craft community.

However, we started from strong strategic work in which we had identified Mi tienda de arte's key strengths and, while this was a niche brand, we had to stay true to the passion for making the Freedom to create accessible and build a narrative powerful enough to match what was already being achieved with Craftelier.

THE CONNECTION TO THE UMBRELLA BRAND

With these solid foundations in place, we began working on a brand link that would help us differentiate the elements the brand would share with Mi tienda de arte as an umbrella and which would give it its own identity. A systemic relationship that helped the ecosystem grow in a more agile, solid, and enriched way.

During this strategic exercise, we identified that in fine arts, the work process and experimentation were key, but from a personality completely different from the one we had developed for Craftelier. And, above all, with nuances and tensions that were entirely its own and where the authentic opportunity for connection with its audiences lay.

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RECLAIMING THE ERROR

Art is a human expression of reinterpretation of what exists in the world and has been present in all societies, across all periods and all places in the world. So we were introducing ourselves to an extremely vast and nearly boundless universe.

We did, however, have some elements present in every artist. And it's that when talking about creative work it's impossible to achieve any result without going through a process in which failures repeat themselves. Scott Adams says that creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes, and in this brand where we started from a freedom to create, we believed it would be fundamental to reclaim them.

This is how the concept Errare artem est was born, an adaptation of the Latin saying that speaks to the human essence of error and shows how failure is a key creative sign for art.

This approach not only made sense as a real part of the process, but also as a neutralizer of error as a barrier that prevents us from enjoying art and kills our creativity.

A FLAWLESS NAMING

Since the brand was starting from scratch, we needed to find a name. We wanted to encapsulate the entire narrative of the strategy and, most importantly, that concept. From here, we developed different creative routes to assert our way of understanding creativity, art, and also error.

We leveraged Latin as an opportunity to tie ourselves to art history and find in the classical a more neutral path to approach our audiences and their cultural sensibility. This is how we started with the Latin word artem, which gave us clarity and professionalism, and which by adding the h—which we could understand as an error—gained personality and ease. Hartem was able to condense in just six letters much of the brand's intentions, the project, and its universe.

A LOGO WITH AUTHORSHIP

When approaching the visual identity, we faced a challenge: to effectively resolve the tension that existed between the pursuit of beauty through the perfection of classical art and the need to experiment without fear or barriers.

In the logo work we set out to condense all the conceptual weight of the brand, that tension between perfection and exploration. The first part is achieved through the use of the Latin word in symmetric typography. Meanwhile, personality is given by a handwritten h that recalls the strokes of writing that exist in artists' signatures, a symbol of expressiveness and their pride as authors.

These visual elements coexist with the differential resources of a verbal identity where Latin nods are recovered, the search for process representation, and the defense of error as a space for exploration and creativity.

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RESOLVING THE CONCEPTUAL TENSION

We continued with the color that not only had to represent the brand, but be able to do so consistently across its main sales channel (digital) and in the reality of own-brand products that would reach our clients' homes.

From there emerges the blank canvas, the beginning of every process, a space waiting to be intervened and representing the illusion of creation. This combines with a black pigment, a tonality that isn't pure black, because it seeks to reflect the real, non-digital sum of all colors. These two basic colors are completed by a third element. We have the canvas, we have all the colors… we're missing the artist. This is represented by a pure Klein blue that carries the name of its discoverer and functions exactly the same online and offline.

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STROKES OF EXPRESSION

The photographic style had to respond to the different semantic fields of the brand's universe: from the world of art to the tools of the process, but there's also a nod to the small flaws or errors found in great works of art, and of course, the human factor of the artist takes on great importance.

As for typography, we opted for a primary typeface for headlines with strong personality, an editorial and classical point that combines with a more functional and legible one for the large amount of information that will need to be compiled across all the brand's different digital channels.

This visual universe is rounded out with resources that allow us to break with perfection and that emerge from the canvases and sketches of test drafts, where we find the pinnacle of expressiveness. Thus, brushstrokes and paint splotches take on all possible forms and adapt to the different formats where the brand will live.

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ROLLING OUT THE E-COMMERCE AND PHYSICAL STORE

With these elements we were ready to turn Hartem into the reference for fine arts products, but we still had challenges ahead: developing both the design of an e-commerce with tens of thousands of references and a physical store in downtown Madrid that is much more than an experience.

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