The Brand Identity – Home of the Greatest in Graphic & Brand Design

Cocoon, a premium direct-to-consumer throw blanket brand, came to A Unified Whole® with its debut collection designed and more than halfway manufactured, along with a name, logo, website and colour naming system. Its founders initially went to the New York-based design studio for a custom website, but the conversation widened quickly into a fresh look at the full brand identity. “We definitely had a vision of something bigger, more polished, more upscale,” explains CEO & Co-founder, Madison Trathan, who started Cocoon with her husband Ned Trathan and his sister Elle Lemon.

“The thing that felt scary about that was it involved taking several steps back from where we were at the time,” Trathan continues, “and redoing a lot of the components we had already checked off. Pushing back our launch by several months was a hard decision to make, but it was absolutely the right one.” The studio’s remit covered strategy and positioning, copywriting and voice, packaging, photo and video production, and a custom Shopify build.

“The brand could not lean solely on craft credentials, because claiming them would have been a lie the product could not back up,” explains A Unified Whole®’s Founder, Jeff Visoky. The identity rests instead on the parts the studio could execute well: the naming of the shades, the art direction, the packaging and the voice. Cocoon sits between the two ends of the throw category – blankets sold on usefulness and blankets sold on luxury. Trathan wanted a blanket paired with a presentation elevated enough to make it a gift or an indulgence, and had found nobody in the market doing it. The idea underneath the position is metamorphosis, ‘rest as transformation.’ “Metamorphosis is the north star, not a motif we apply,” Visoky tells us. “It rarely shows up literally in the design, and that is deliberate. If the identity performed the idea, it would read as decoration.” Outside the design itself, the customer finds the idea in the content, where every decision is checked against that north star.

The debut collection has 18 numbered shades in solids, stripes and washed, such as No. 001 Silk, No. 011 Strata Wash and No. 014 Iris Stripe.Cocoon plans to keep releasing curated collections, so the numbers give the brand an archive and let a customer see the sequence. Every name comes from the world of cocooning and metamorphosis. “No literal colour words, but the name still has to be true to the shade in nature, which is why Loam represents brown without saying brown,” Visoky details. Suffixes have fixed meanings, so a Stripe name signals a change in construction, not in colour, and what the names have in common is a shared world and tone. Adopting the system A Unified Whole® developed meant retiring the one Cocoon had arrived with. “The hard part was probably letting go of the old system because we did still like it and we had designed all of the colours and patterns around the names so it felt personal to us,” Trathan notes. “But the system that AUW developed had an elegance and sophistication to it that layered into the rest of the brand ecosystem beautifully.”

Shipping with every blanket is a ‘persona tag,’ a small two-sided hangtag with the wordmark, the collection number and the shade name on the front, and the written description for that colourway on the reverse, along with its season, function and temperament. Each of the 18 is written as a character, which keeps a collection of that size from turning into an inventory list. “Once a shade has a temperament, choosing between them stops being a colour decision and becomes a question of which one sounds like you,” Visoky adds.

The wordmark is custom lettering, drawn in-house. Early directions that tried to make the letters illustrate the metamorphosis idea were dropped, as they were pushing towards craft or wellness, and the studio wanted Cocoon to look more like an approachable fashion house. The macrons over the ‘O’s come from the phonetic spelling of ‘Cocoon’. They were added by hand, as no retail typeface offered the specific treatment they were looking for. “Pronunciation is the most intimate form of language, because you do not experience it by looking; you experience it by speaking. It requires your voice. That aligns with a product you do not just look at but physically experience,” Visoky notes. The monogram is the one place metamorphosis enters the design directly, drawn to look like a butterfly, quietly enough that it doesn’t feel on the nose.

For display and editorial copy, the identity uses Brian J. Bonislawsky’s Marcellus Regular, a flared serif drawn from Roman inscriptional letterforms. Functional copy is set in the Book and Bold weights of Maison Neue, a clean grotesque designed by Timo Gaessner for Milieu Grotesque. The serif is used for emotion and naming, the grotesque for information. The palette is tonal, with warm creams, charcoals, muted greens, earthy browns and quiet accents, so the colour belongs to the blankets and the identity never tries to compete with them. Layouts use large editorial photography, a simple hierarchy and generous negative space.

“We were not going to out-claim anyone on softness.” Visoky continues, “You can assert it, but the image cannot prove it.” How a blanket looks in a room can be shown, so the art direction took that as its subject and made the premise a blanket that stays out rather than folded away. The photography uses considered framing, real rooms and real light, with the blanket styled the way it would actually be left lying around. Frames are wider than in a product shot, so the room is visible and the blanket is just one element in it.

Tissue paper and glassine envelopes were designed as part of the identity, and the packaging is where the metamorphosis idea is structural – layered so that a customer moves through stages before reaching the blanket. A rigid magnetic box, blind embossed on the lid and minimal otherwise, opens onto a custom insert with an envelope closed by a wax seal, holding a thank-you note, the persona tag and the care card. Under that, the blanket is wrapped in custom tissue sealed with a blind embossed sticker. “Nothing is loud, and nothing is disposable, so by the time you reach the blanket you have already been told how to regard it,” Visoky explains.

Building the site in-house let the studio design and develop it side-by-side. The palette, the type system and the layout rules were already set, so applying them was direct, with no handover in which decisions are reinterpreted by someone who was not in the room. The studio knew the hover state on the eCommerce pages would be a macro shot showing texture, so it was shot deliberately, and the flat lays were colour corrected consistently and shot on the same background because they would sit next to each other in a grid. “We kept the promotional layer under the same restraint as the identity: no urgency language, no exclamation, offers stated plainly and then dropped,” Visoky concludes. “That was harder to hold than any layout decision, because the pressure to loosen it is constant.”