Studio Blackburn gives Ellis Butchers a cast of characters from meat

Ellis Butchers is a pair of sustainable, whole-carcass butcher shops in Blackheath, southeast London. Founder Nick Ellis acquired two long-standing shops at once, one in Blackheath Village and one in Blackheath Standard, each with its own neighbourhood to answer to, and he wanted both to belong to one premium parent brand. For the strategy and identity that would bring them together, Ellis turned to London-based brand agency Studio Blackburn, which resolved the split with an idea it calls ‘Seriously Playful.’ Studio Blackburn treated the job as a question of architecture: one parent, Ellis Butchers, sitting above two shops with deliberately different personalities for two different local audiences. The Village leans into heritage, trading from premises with more than a century of butchery behind them; the Standard is pitched as the younger, more contemporary sister. Both defer to a parent that stands for ethical sourcing, minimal waste and whole-carcass butchery. Butcher branding tends to rely on a narrow and well-worn toolkit: the meat cut chart, the livestock silhouette, vintage engraving and gold-leaf signwriting. Studio Blackburn set most of it aside. “We always look closely at the sector vernacular before starting a project, and then we try to rip up the rulebook without alienating people,” Creative Director Mark Jones tells us. The studio “ruled out default options like livestock silhouettes and cut charts immediately,” he explains, “because they represent the path of least resistance,” leaving no cut chart anywhere in the finished system. “The Blackheath Village shop earned the right to keep its historic architectural soul, but the graphics needed to feel entirely fresh,” Jones adds. In place of the ruled-out livestock and cut charts, the studio made the product itself the star, humanising the meat rather than the animal it came from.