Brand Creation for Réservation
The new fragrance, lifestyle and cultural curator brand, Réservation, launched this month during Milan’s fashion week calendar. Founded by Palm Angels founder Francesco Ragazzi in partnership with Pietro Ruffini of Archive investments, this brand transcends simple definition. Despite its launch during fashion season and its focus on fragrance, Réservation sits compellingly at the intersection of scent craftsmanship, hospitality and culture – a dynamic differentiation for a new challenger in the beauty landscape.
Construct was chosen by the brand’s Artistic Director Frédérique Obin – the woman who shaped the magnetic appeal of H?tel Costes in Paris, and a former client of Construct’s thanks to épi Baie de Pampelonne – to create the brand for Réservation. This involved defining the strategy, crafting a visual identity and delivering an exciting combination of the nostalgic, enduring appeal of hospitality with French craftsmanship and the allure of California.
Why do creative leaders choose Construct? Because we are artisan brand builders more than we are visual marketeers. We create for creative visionaries. This requires a specific and unique lens on design, culture, industry and audience beyond the classic deliverables of a beautiful brand identity. Construct does not have a ‘house’ style: we work in an ego-less collaboration with creative clients – we share their vision and their challenges, and we work together to create transcendent value in objective partnership.
As a design craft atelier, Construct is empowered to take creative risks, play with ideas and build brands with natural, authentic imperfections that in turn resonate more deeply with the audience. Our creative cycle is one of feeling leading thought leading feeling: a continuous interplay between the intuitive and the intellectual, rather than a linear process of delivery. For Construct, one plus one rarely equals two.?
"Our creative process exists in a tension between clarity of understanding, focus on objectives and problem solving on one side and on the other, the risk, play and imperfection required to speak to an audience, to create inherent emotional resonance." – Georgia Fendley, Founder, Construct
For our teams, the Réservation project reflected a moment in time. This was about the creation of a completely new interpretation of a lifestyle category, led by contradictions and complexities that made the project all the richer. Cultural references were a high/low mix, with affection for nostalgia steadied with enough rigour not to veer into pastiche. We wanted to evoke memories of the familiar, through a visual and verbal narrative that felt totally new. Embedded in Réservation’s brand values are a passion for aesthetics, thoughtful design and the love for a certain art of living, encompassing luxury and decadence. At its core, Réservation is an invitation to explore a carefully curated world where fragrance transcends time and place.
Unlike classic ‘beauty’ brands, Réservation is not about perfection but about the cerebral, emotive, connected and meaningful. Fragrance is central to the things that matter most in life - memories, feelings, moments that are both personal and hard to recreate.
To ensure this new brand could embody and deliver the emotive and the ephemeral, Construct underpinned the creative expression with technical process and precision. The approach to the visual identity was strategically designed to give the brand a lot more freedom than the confines of traditional branding. By crafting a complex brand palette, all constituent parts can be used with far greater autonomy and the ability to shift and transform as the brand evolves.
"Today when we create a brand it's?more important than ever to build a layered brand palette, by this I mean a repertoire of brand signals, icons, word marques, visual signifiers, behavioural traits and recognisable moments of expression. I am particularly interested?in this interplay, as a synesthetic I naturally 'perceive together' so this process feels automatic to me. When?we do this, we create brands able to communicate with dynamism?built for intuitive response. Brands built this way invite connection.” – ?Georgia Fendley, Founder, Construct
We describe this as building a brand, then deconstructing to reconstruct – it’s not a cookie-cutter approach to branding – it sets up a natural cycle of evolution and endless possibilities for transformation, without relying on seasonal campaigns or the requirement for endless rebrands.?
Construct builds for intuitive engagement – we create to open real relationships with the most discerning consumers, developing principles and providing the opportunity for more agile and responsive brand communication.