Branded Vendor Collateral
Every year Broadcat exhibits as a vendor at the Society of Corporate Compliance and Ethics, one of the biggest conferences for Compliance professionals around the world. They tend to be very corporate-y, so to stand out our design team intentionally established a friendly tone for the brand that would create engagement. Part of that included creating interesting (and silly) collateral to give away to prospects and customers at these conferences.
SCCE 2017 Conference in Las Vegas with Xinia Pirkey and Courtney Sander.
Broadcat’s logo is a purple cat inspired by kawaii, so many of the marketing materials lean into the bold colors and playful illustrations already in the brand. We often brought in our own personalities into the brand, like a heavy metal T-shirt that spelled out “Broadcat” in the shape of the mascot to honor the founder’s love of metal, and temporary tattoos designed as a nod to the Americana bold line tattoos many of our employees sported, which unintentionally made us easily identifiable at these conferences.
Some examples of the merch/collateral Broadcat created. Not all items in this picture were designed by me, Ryan Rushing created the stickers and T-shirt design.
One crowd favorite was my design of Broadcat’s own Chinese seal that reads “Do the right thing” in simplified Chinese. This is a common phrase used in the compliance industry as the overall mission for their teams as they guide employees in making ethical decisions.
Many of Broadcat’s customers function in the Chinese economy, and anticorruption is a key risk area there, like many other large economies like Brazil, and Russia, and India (BRIC).
We wanted to highlight the importance of business compliance in China in a way that celebrated Chinese culture without appropriating it. We landed on the concept of recreating the traditional Chinese chop/seal and consulted with some of our Chinese customers to provide feedback on the design and translation. These seals carry a great amount of reverence and beauty, and we thought the concept aligned well with Broadcat’s brand identity and the seriousness of the “Do the right thing” message among compliance professionals.
For the design, I was inspired by the bold red in this traditional Chinese block printing technique used for seals. Because we were originally planning to make this a T-shirt, the concept worked well to create a single-color design for easy screen-printing. We later decided to also make enamel pins and an actual stamp to represent the seal!
In addition to the bold red, it needed to be active and engaging like Broadcat, so I used brand motifs like the starburst behind the cat to frame up the space, and create an elongated rectangle.
After blocking out the shapes and the text, our I went back through the vector anchors to create organic edges to better represent imperfections of a stamp when transferred.
We printed it through Real Thread and used their water-based ink to get a look that closely resembled how the ink slightly sinks into the paper in a relief print like a stamp or seal. This design continues to be one of Broadcat’s most requested shirts to this day!
