our brand
our brand
MA
UR
RE
RE
ET
ST
ST
LL
GH
HA
WB
RS
NE
ET
Y Z
A L AF O CA
RN
AB
Y
ST
RE
ET
A G
T N
N O
T S
E R
T E
LO N D O N
L AZ Y OAF
#KEEPING IT WEIRD SINCE 2001
Contents. Our Story / 1 Our Vision / 4 Our Mission / 5 Our Values / 7 Brand Position / 9 Our Consumer / 10 Our Product / 14 - Collaborations / 16
Brand Guidelines / 19
- Logo / 20 - Font / 23 - Colour /25 - Image / 27 - Tone & Communication / 29 - Store Requirements / 33
Sustainability / 35
Our Story.
Gemma Shiel / Leader and Creator
Lets get to know eachother
01
Hello fellow Oafer, welcome to Lazy Oaf. We have been keeping Men’s and Women’s fashion weird since 2001 and we don’t plan on stopping any time soon. Here at Lazy Oaf, we have a very unique take on streetwear and design. Based in our flagship boutique in the heart of London’s Soho, we keep our collections irreverent and playful. Our brand is independent and so are our products. Our inspiration comes from youth nostalgia and nonconformity. Our collections focus on using bold colours, graphic prints and illustrations.
Illustrator and designer, Gemma Shiel - also known as our leader, is the creative mastermind behind Lazy Oaf. Gemma founded the brand straight out of University in 2001, starting as just a small stall in Spitalfields. She took Lazy Oaf from her Dad’s garage to a flagship boutique in Soho. Now, we have a massively successful website and over 250 stockists worldwide - all achieved with absolutely no outside investment. Gemma’s fun-poking approach to life is at the root of our design ethos. She has steered us on to special collaborations with creatives; from YouTubers (such as ‘Dont Hug Me I’m Scared’) and other independent brands to high profile collabs with the likes of DC Comics, Warner Brothers and Dreamworks (basically; Batman, Looney Tunes, Garfield and Casper).
Always keep our focus on designing products us and our customers love, not just following trends. Never lose our personality.
04 Our Vision. What matters most / Our hopes
L O
A A
Z Y F
Our Mission. What drives us / Our main objective
05
Keeping fashion fun, accessible and tangible to our customers.
Our Values. What we stand for / Our beliefs
07
As a brand, Lazy Oaf holds many values and we ensure that they are incorporated in everything we do.
A D A V C E C SELF-EXPRESSION T S F U S U R NON-CONFORMIT Y E B I REBELLION I T C R E AT I V I T Y
We hand pick our collaborations who compliment these values and our consumers share and respect them too.
High price point
“Unique” Brands
Low price point
Brand position. Where we place ourselves in the market
09 “Mass Market” Brands
Not to blow our own trumpet...but we don’t tend to compare ourselves to other brands. We set our own rules and we don’t follow the crowd. Our pricing is based upon the distinct designs we produce; you won’t see them anywhere else on the market as we strive to maintain the quality of our product. Of course, sometimes a little comparison is necesscary...
10 Our Consumer. Get to know our devoted Oafers
At Lazy Oaf, when we think of our consumer, we think in terms of personality traits rather than age – Oafers are young at heart… Although, our consumers are typically aged 16-30 and feel absolutely no obligation to “fit in”, Oafers have a fabulous sense of humour and profound appreciation of sarcasm.
Most of our consumers are not into fast fashion – they are happy to invest a little more for a quality product that is going to last longer. Our products are priced so we can still make a profit that reflects the effort exerted, but not so highly that we are ripping off our customers. Essentially, we don’t take the piss.
12
“There’s always two separate people, I guess. For womenswear, I’m always imagining sort of a dorky — I don’t know, “dorky” is maybe not the right word, it’s not fair. The girl who has the sense of the outsider. The girl who, at high school, floats around with all the different social groups; she’s not really part of any particular scene. And she’s into her own geeky things and likes fashion; she has a bit of a punk attitude, a bit rebellious. She probably has amazing hair.”
“The boy inspiration—definitely hangs out with the girl. I guess it’s kind of a reflection of the boys I spent too much time hanging out with. They’re also the guy that’s probably going to get you in trouble and break your heart. What your mum would call a “bad influence.””
Throughout our entire design and planning process we keep our customer at heart, the above two quotes from Gem give you an idea of who we have in mind when we say “consumer”.
Our Product. Lets get to the good stuff
14
Our product design inspiration mostly comes from everyday life and situations. Our design team quite often take their ideas from situations such as sitting at a bus stop and overhearing someone’s conversation about what they did yesterday, or what pets they’ve got at home and what ailments they might have. We want to keep our products fully accessible, we never want to be one of
those brands that make you feel like “I’ll never be able to afford to buy that”(you know the ones). We like the same stuff our customers do. We have now expanded into all areas; from shoes and shirts to dog leads and bum bags.
Collaborations. We are most famous for our graphic/illustrated tees; as that is of course where the business started. We now collaborate with major brands and up and coming independent artists to create new and unique collections. We are so proud of our collaborations. They are what make us unique. Whether it be with huge brands such as Daria or smalller artists such as Ellie Andrews, we always inject a bit of Lazy Oaf spirit and we never lose control of the creative process.
19
The Guidelines. How to stay on brand
The Logo.
Our full logo doesn’t tend to be used as part of the actual designs of products.
looks clean and is visible its pretty much a yes from us.
Like much else in life, we take a fairly laid back approach to our logo placement, as long as it
We have a few different variations of our main logo. Sometimes we also bring out logos for particular ranges for example our L.O collection has it’s own logo.
minimum space
10mm 10mm
(1) Our basic logo - used on website, official documents, gift cards, product labels, our store front etc (The serious stuff).
The Variations. (2) Our basic logo + the eyes.
(3) The eyes alone - You will notice on our website ‘the eyes’ follow the movement of your cursor. When using ‘the eyes’ you may change the direction of the pupils if it works in that situation.
(4) Our basic logo + the eyes 2.0 - we use this when we need a nice square logo.
Here you can see how our logos should be placed on backgrounds. Only use the black logo on light backgrounds and the white version on dark backgrounds. Ensure that when using the logo it always stands out.
The Font.
Because we use such a range of colours, shapes and patterns in our branding, we have decided stick to one main font. The font we use is super flexible, as you can see it can be used in many different sizes and weights.
The font we use for our logo is ‘Futura’. The logo is the only place this font should be used. The logo is always written in BOLD CAPITALS:
Futura
ABCDE FG
Larsseit Abcdef abcdef abcdefghi abcdefghi
Our main brand font is Larsseit (the more observant of you will realise this sentence is written in Larsseit, well done). This is used for body text, titles, sub-headings, anything and everything you fancy to be honest.
For main body text e.g. on website, keep it between 10pt - 14pt. Keep titles / headings between 37pt - 26pt. We tend to use a mixture of weights but our favourites are medium and semi-bold.
The Colour Palette.
As we mentioned earlier, we use a variety of colours in our branding. Our website is primarily monochrome because we like to use it as a blank canvas to display our colourful designs. We don’t agree with limiting ourselves to 2 or 3 brand
colours because we feel it restricts our creativity. Afterall, muted neutral tones aren’t all that memorable, are they?
Darkest Hour is primarily used for text.
X Cre m C T 9 eD 1 9 5 e 6
PA N TO
NE
9
38
C
17
U 7 8
PA N TO
NE
PA N TO
NE
2
PA N TO
th e
38
C 7
en
NE
M
1
TO N E 2 N A P 001
9
r k a e D st H M ou TP r 9
We’ve got 3 words for you: vintage, pastel and rainbow.
Image Guidelines.
Most of our product images are displayed on a model against a white background. We are proud of our products, therefore we display between 3-6 images of each one so our customers can fall madly in love. We won’t use an image unless it is perfect quality. Some of our images are
purposely out of focus or grainy to compliment a product or concept. As our brand is all about self expression and not really giving a crap about what others think, we are completely against airbrushing or re-touching our models - they are beaut just the way they are. We do however use colour enhancement, but it is limited - we do not want to falsely advertise.
“We work with Anti-Agency, which has a huge array of interesting models. They’re actually doing pretty cool stuff too. Some of them are musicians, skateboarders— they’re enjoying their own subcultures. It’s great for Lazy Oaf because we have a massive personality and that’s part of it.” - Gemma Shiel
Tone Of Voice / Communication Guidelines.
Our tone of voice is extremely informal. We speak to our consumers like we would speak to our friends - sarcastic and truthful. On social media, we refer to our followers on a whole as ‘Oafers’ - but be careful not to overuse it. We would describe our tone of voice as: witty,
informative, relaxed, relatable (to our target market) and bold. So keep all of these things in mind when writing posts. As the tone is informal, you can use abbreiviations such as ‘cos’ instead of ‘because’ and acronyms such as ‘wtf’ instead of...Google it. Please, always know the difference between their, they’re and there. We also LOVE a good pun.
The Main Touchpoints.
We want to ensure our brand is kept synonymous across all touchpoints. Our main touchpoints are the website, social media, email and the store. Our social media channels are the easiest way to interact with our customer base because we can be a little bit less formal and show our true personality. We keep our posts
short, snappy and informative. We don’t tend to reply to/like comments unless they are about product info - when we do it is always polite response. Unless we have an event or a new collection launch, we tend to only post once a day per social media channel.
At Lazy Oaf, when it comes to social media we have a very modern mindset; we are learning the affects it can have if you overdo it so we try and limit our usage. Of course it is a very powerful tool. We feel the same about email marketing. Why spam our customers when we know they already love us? Being needy is not attractive Ladies and Gents. We simply keep our Oafers updated on upcoming/new in collections and blogposts - just a little reminder so they don’t forget about us. If we recieve email complaints, we respond to them in a polite, helpful and apologetic manner. We take a formal tone when dealing with complaints customers do not want to a patronising or sarcastic reply.
#KEEP IT WEIRD
Store Requirements. Our store is cosy and we love it. We think it really reflects our brand because it is quirky and its petite size makes it very personal. Much like our website, we have kept our store quite blank as we change our stock frequently and need it to be flexible. Our products are displayed on free standing units and floating shelves/boxes that can be easily adapted and removed when we hold events.
Our minimalist and “almost conceptual� approach to merchandising means the store never feels overstocked or busy. - Gemma Shiel
Sustainability Our responsibility
35
We produce our clothes in a number of factories in China, we use China as they have a long history of manufacturing garments so their regulations are much stricter. We are supporters of fair wages and safe working conditions, that is why we visit the factories twice a year to ensure that the standards are to a satisfactory level. Here at Lazy Oaf we have high standards
when it comes to how our clothes are made and where. We value our customers so much and know how much it matters to them to know their clothes have been made in safe working conditions with fair wages. Our clothes are not mass produced, we run very limited collections - which are very much first come first serve. Being a female led business, we are full supporters of sewing up that Gender Pay Gap.
We are constantly evolving and looking for ways to become more sustainable.
our brand
la zy (ley-zee, adj)
averse or disinclined to work, activity or exertion; indolent.
oaf
(ohf, noun)
a clumsy, stupid person: lout.
