Crafted with Wonder: behind our rebrand
It would be no understatement to call Vince Frost a powerhouse. The prolific, globally renowned founder, CEO and executive creative director of Frost*collective hums with a tenacious optimism that echoes in every project he touches. It’s clear in his conversations, which bubble over with tangents into the divine, the existential and the wonderfully mundane (and are memorialised in his Design Your Life podcast) and in the work he produces, including the recent brand refresh he undertook with Eco Outdoor.
When we approached Vince to help us reimagine branding that would embody Eco Outdoor’s next chapter, he was deeply enthusiastic about translating our big ideas into language, collateral and signage that best reflected our vision. “The brand was already living and breathing and doing incredibly well, but it was about how my team and I could bring the business to the next ambition Eco Outdoor had,” Vince says. ‘Crafted with Wonder’ became the launchpad for the new branding, reflecting our passion for materiality and our constant, innate curiosity. It also became the baseline for all conversations from that point forward.
“Eco Outdoor lives and breathes the ‘Crafted with Wonder’ positioning. It came from them. We helped them to articulate and simplify it."
The rebrand required a fundamental rethink of the way we presented ourselves to the world, with practical applications befitting our love of materiality. “When we talk about ‘Crafted with Wonder’, we need to apply that philosophy to everything that Eco Outdoor does,” says Vince. “Eco wanted to have new signage on the buildings that was genuine and authentic.” Vince envisioned an artisan-crafted bronze sign that would patina and age over time. We were onboard straight away. We paired that with a contemporised logo, digital and collateral refresh, a new website that celebrated materials and nature through exceptional photography, image-centric project feature stories, and an easy-to-navigate digital catalogue. Raw materials were depicted in both their natural form and in situ. We switched our fonts, simplified our messaging and came back to the core of what we do best: natural architectural surfaces.
“People are often unaware of the effects of what’s around them, whether it’s nature or hardcore noise or aggressiveness or messiness or light or materials. They can have such a massive influence on us, good and bad. I feel the palette and choice of materials of Eco Outdoor are really playing to the senses in a positive way." And it’s not just lip service: Vince believes in our product so much that when he decided to renovate his mid-century Sydney home, he chose our Scala travertine for the flooring. Naturally, he thought outside the box, using the typically external tiles inside the home to create an ageless, material-focused design. “I’ve always bought things that were designed to be timeless, to last forever: a one-time purchase that you’ll never regret and you’ll never need to change. The Eco Outdoor palette does create comfort, it does soothe; it creates a peacefulness. You can’t beat nature, can you?”
