Polar is its own client at P.A.C., an artisanal bakery in São Paulo

P.A.C. is an artisanal bakery in São Paulo with a menu that changes week to week. Polar, Ltda. created its identity to change just as often, across the packaging, ceramics, printed menus and the space itself. The Brazilian design studio has four partners. Two of them – Founders & Creative Directors Bruno Ribeiro and Ralph Mayer – are also partners in the bakery, while the other two are regulars there as well. “When we started P.A.C., there wasn’t really a brand yet,” Ribeiro tells us. “There was the bakery, the sourdough starter, a space taking shape and a lot of enthusiasm around bread, but none of us had experience running a professional kitchen.” The menu, service and space were also still being worked out, and the identity had to change as they did. “We knew things were going to change a lot in the beginning,” Mayer explains, “so we didn’t want to create something that felt finished too early. The identity needed to be flexible enough to adapt as we learned what P.A.C. was going to become.” “We don’t really have the distance you would normally have between a studio and a client, so decisions and feedback happen very quickly,” Ribeiro notes. “It also gives us more freedom to test things that might be harder to introduce in a more traditional client relationship.” That closeness lets the identity keep changing. Polar designed all the assets, from uniforms to bathroom signage and counter labels. “Most of it was made in-house and often in response to what we needed at the time,” Mayer details. “That was important to us because it meant we could keep making and changing things as the bakery evolved, instead of having to define everything in advance.”