A Unified Whole® based Cocoon’s identity on an idea it never illustrates

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.