Branding & Identity Design 

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Calcott Hall Farm

Calcott Hall Farm is an independent, family-run farm shop set on a working farm in Brentwood, Essex, serving a loyal community across three generations of customers. The team prides itself on sourcing the freshest fruit, vegetables, meat, cheese, and grocery staples from as close to home as possible, with quality and provenance at the heart of every decision. As a business, Calcott Hall Farm balances deep roots in the local community with an ambition to keep evolving so that parents who once visited as children now bring their own kids to the farm.

The Mission

Our mission was to refresh a 50-year-old logo and identity so that it could confidently carry Calcott Hall Farm into the next 50 years without losing the character people already love. The brief was to create a more coherent, professional identity that could flex across signage, uniforms, packaging and digital channels while still feeling unmistakably “Calcott.” We set out to preserve their heritage and personality, remove visual inconsistencies and position the farm shop as a forward-looking, quality-led destination with a clear and ownable look.

The Brief

The project was prompted by a clear inflection point for the business. Calcott Hall Farm has big plans for future growth and their long-standing logo was no longer keeping pace with where the business was headed. After fifty years of loyal service, the original mark felt dated and difficult to extend across new touchpoints, from in-store signage to uniforms and digital communications. The owners saw the rebrand as an opportunity to align how they looked with how they actually operated: modern, organised and confident, yet still warm, familiar and rooted in the farm’s history.

The Process

We approached the project with our thorough and strategic process, adapted to the realities of a busy, hands-on farm shop.

Discovery and immersion

We began with a workshop and digging into the existing brand materials, then spending time understanding how customers experience the shop today. We looked at the branding in context: signage, uniforms, reward cards, and on-site communications. We also explored competitor and peer brands, from supermarkets to local farm shops.

Brand definition and positioning

Using the client’s own language, we clarified Calcott Hall Farm’s brand pillars: exceptional freshness and quality; friendly, expert service and a proud, community-focused spirit. We distilled their aspiration into a simple direction: “heritage you can still feel, with a sharper, more professional face.” This became our benchmark for every creative decision.

Concept development

From there, we developed a range of logo concepts that spanned different levels of evolution and change. Some options leaned more contemporary, using clean sans serif typography and minimal styling, while others explored refined script influences and more expressive marks. We were careful to demonstrate how each route would live across real-world touchpoints such as in-store signage and staff uniforms.

Collaborative refinement

When we presented the concepts, the client gravitated strongly toward a modernised, hand-written style that honoured their long-standing logo and script heritage. They wanted customers to recognise “their” farm shop instantly, even with a new polish. We focused subsequent rounds on refining this direction: redrawing letterforms for better balance, testing letterspacing and stroke weight for legibility at scale, and pairing the script with a robust supporting typeface.

The Logo

Our logo concept was designed to build a clear bridge between past and future: a respectful evolution of Calcott Hall Farm’s long-standing identity rather than a hard break. By retaining and refining the flowing script style in “Calcott,” we paid deliberate homage to the original logo, allowing loyal customers to feel an immediate sense of familiarity and continuity. The redrawn script lettering adds warmth and personality, signalling the care, attention, and hands-on nature of a family-run business. Script forms are subconsciously associated with authenticity, tradition and personal connection, which maps directly to Calcott Hall’s brand DNA and the multi-generational relationships they’ve nurtured with their customers.

Once the core logo was final, we engineered it into a practical system that would work as hard as the farm team does. We established clear spacing rules, hierarchy between “Calcott” and “Hall Farm Shop,” and guidelines for how the mark should appear across large-format signage, staff clothing, print, and digital uses. We also refined colour choices to ensure strong visibility in-store and outdoors, while remaining true to the farm’s natural, food-led environment.

As we systemised the brand, we also developed a suite of custom illustrations that could extend the identity beyond the logo alone. These illustrations were crafted to feel hand-touched and characterful, echoing the script “Calcott” while celebrating the farm’s core offer: produce, countryside, and the welcoming atmosphere of the shop. From the outset, we designed these assets with merchandise in mind, testing how they would behave on products such as tote bags, enamel mugs, aprons, and giftable items that customers could take home as a tangible reminder of their visit.

We developed a set of richly textured assets by physically experimenting with real farm materials and surfaces, layering rubbings, prints and inky impressions taken directly on site. These rugged, earthy marks ground the identity in the everyday mess and graft of farm life, turning mud, metal and machinery into a visual language that feels lived-in, characterful and unmistakably Calcott.