This project was intended to be an exercise on brand identity creation and we were given a choice to take an existing brand and use our specific stylizations in order to make a successful rebrand. I chose Spirit Halloween, a titan in the Halloween Industry. Spirit Halloween has successfully managed to have their brand be associated with the holiday itself, making it incredibly successful. Their mascot--Jack the Reaper--is possibly the most recongizable of all Halloween characters. I decided instead of completely rebranding the iconic brand, I decided to approach this project with the mindset of helping enhance the brand for their customer base.
Spirit Halloween has successfully managed to have their brand be associated with the holiday itself, making it incredibly successful. While the target audience of Spirit Halloween is specifically for people who enjoy Halloween, the majority of people purchasing from Spirit Halloween are young parents. Young parents from ages 20-30 make up 60% of their customer base, as the holiday does cater to young children the most with the tradition of Trick o' Treating. Due to this information, I felt like creating a child-friend verision of Spirit's mascot would be benefical for the brand.
Jack the Reaper, while an incredibly recongizeable face--is quite scary to look at. With my research, I decided to create a character that would be friendlier to young ages. While in the brainstorming phase of concepting, I wanted to make sure that the shapes of the character were overall soft and rounded--while also maintaining the brand's original affection towards skeletons. Eventually I landed on creating Jack's little brother--Salem! Salem acts as the brand mascot's for children's costumes, providing young kids a kinder and more inviting face when it comes to all things Halloween.
To continue with softening the brand and to help update it to a more modern audience--the logo's font changed to Monsterific BB to match Salem's softer look.
