How did Studio Chapeaux build a typeface specifically for packaging?

SC Ostrea is the first typeface released by Hamburg-based Studio Chapeaux, a bold, characterful display typeface built specifically for packaging, and rather than showcase it on a specimen sheet, the studio put it straight to work on Broken Oyster Club, an in-house brand created to prove what it can do. “It has the same rough edges and corners oysters have in nature,” Nils R. Zimmermann, Founder & Creative Director, explains. “Irregular. Unpredictable.” As product categories multiply and shelves grow more crowded, Studio Chapeaux sees the fight for attention at the point of sale settling on one thing. “Type accounts for 60% of how a bold commercial package is perceived – that’s not up for debate,” Zimmermann notes, the studio treating type not as a supporting layer behind an illustration or a photograph but as the primary decision maker. Heavier, chunkier letterforms are, by the studio’s reckoning, functionally superior, holding up under glare, distance and the compression of print where thin type collapses – which is why they are steadily replacing logos and illustration as the primary signal on the shelf. “It has to hold its own from a shelf’s distance, survive the compression of print onto a curved can or a tight label, and still carry personality at two centimetres high,” Zimmermann details. It also has to accommodate the weights, measurements, ingredients and legal copy every product must carry, without any of it looking like an afterthought; the typeface has to be a symbiosis with the product. SC Ostrea is the studio’s demonstration of that, which Zimmermann calls “our amuse-bouche from the kitchen: what happens when a typeface is built to fit a product perfectly.” The name is just as literal, taken from the European flat oyster, Ostrea edulis. “We wanted the name to work exactly like the typeface does,” he adds, “rooted literally in the animal, not bolted on as a metaphor afterwards.”