Retail brand creation
& development
in Washington, D.C.

Own-brand packs carry words that do work. Organic. Recycled. High in fibre. Made with real fruit. Each of those is a claim, and a claim is a statement somebody outside your company can test.

The design question and the evidence question arrive together. A claim needs a source before it needs a typeface. That source is usually a certificate, a specification from the packer, or a laboratory result, and it belongs in the same folder as the artwork rather than in somebody’s inbox.

Three kinds of claim behave differently. Regulated claims about nutrition and health have set wording and set thresholds, and the wording is not yours to improve. Certification claims depend on a scheme with an owner, a number and an expiry. Everything else is a marketing claim, and those are the ones that quietly become a problem, because nobody is asked to prove them until somebody does.

Expiry is the part that catches people. A certificate lapses on a date. The printed carton does not. Artwork with a scheme mark and no renewal date attached to it will outlive the certificate that justified it, and the stock sits on a shelf for months.

So we keep a claims register alongside the range. Every claim on every pack, the evidence behind it, who owns that evidence, and when it needs checking again. It is a spreadsheet. It is also the difference between a recall conversation and a routine one.

Recycled content is worth naming on its own, because the wording is precise and often used loosely. A pack can be recyclable, or contain recycled material, or be made from a material that is collected in some places and not others. Those are three statements. Only one of them is usually true of any given pack.

Comparative wording deserves the same care. Words that compare a product to a version that no longer exists, or to a category average nobody published, look confident on a layout and hold up badly.

Then the hierarchy on the front of pack. A claim competes for the same space as the product name and the variant. A pack shouting four claims reads as a pack with nothing to say. Choose the one that a shopper uses to decide, give it room, and move the rest to the back where there is space to qualify it properly.

What we hand over is the artwork and the register together. Neither is much use alone. The register is what lets somebody else pick the range up in two years and know which words are still safe to print.