A Case Study: Raymour & Flanigan Icon Rebranding
Raymour & Flanigan has been helping people create a home they love for over 70 years! It’s amazing to see the largest furniture retailer in the North East of USA thrive. Their commitment to customers, culture, and community remains at the forefront of everything they do which is why they reached out to me for a little help in their icon rebranding.
The Challenge
Because Raymour & Flanigan is one of the largest furniture retailers in the North East with a huge selection, their features, fabrics and every other detail of their products needed to be easily organized and identifiable online. Raymour & Flanigan knew they needed to find a way to cohesively incorporate features on their website to help educate customers while maintaining their brand identity. They knew that their answer was an icon rebranding with Hollei Anne Design Co.
The Goal
Rebrand Raymour & Flanigan's existing icons to maintain and align with their brand identity as well as create new icons, ensuring a professional and cohesive look and feel consistent throughout their website.
The Solution
When I was first approached by Raymour & Flanigan I was so excited to dive deeper into their brand, mission, and audience to really understand how these icons would impact the end user. I really dove into market research to see what their competitors were doing. If their competitors had icons, what they looked like and how they were using them.
After doing thorough research I developed 3 distinct styles:
Style 1 Shade of Color: Clean monoline look with small pop of light purple that creates a small shade effect.
Style 2 Color Block: Grey shapes with line work in the Raymour purple. Allowing details and arrows to stand out from the icons.
Style 3 Traditional Sketch: Sketchy line work with a little more detail. Giving a warm and cozy feel and is different from what we’re seeing in market research.
After presenting the 3 styles, I included a comparison of all 3, what they look like on a color background and how they can be used on an image.
Raymour & Flanigan ultimately landed on Style 1: Shade of Color which featured a pop of light purple for a shading effect. Plum purple is their primary brand color, so adding in a touch of that color brought in some warmth and uniqueness from their competitors.
After landing on a unique and brand cohesive icon style, I then started to rebrand Raymour & Flanigan’s existing icons and created some new resulting in around 150+ icon designs.
The Results
Raymour & Flanigan was so pleased with each little icon and requested more, over time I designed over 450+ icons for Raymour & Flanigan’s Website. Each icon was a little illustration and puzzle. When working with designing icons the scale and legibility are my main focus and concern. Some icons are matter of fact like “Mattress in a box” and other icons are more subjective like “Accessible Home”. I find the act of creating icons to be like little brain teasers, theres a lot of conceptual thinking that goes into it. When I design them I ask “How can we identify something with the least amount of details while still being legible at a tiny size?” Where we landed with all 450+ icons was the answer to that question.
I can’t wait to see how Raymour & Flanigan continues to use these icons as part of their brand identity beyond their website! You can view all of these tiny puzzles on their website inside of their filter selections to help identify features of furniture through out the site.
I’d love to help support your rebrand or supplement your brand identity with illustrations!
With over 10+ years of design expertise in branding, illustration and product design, I’m confident I can help your brand stand out amongst competitors in a saturated market. I’ve worked with brands like Toys R Us, Skip Hop, Christmas Tree Shops and now Raymour & Flanigan to help take their brand identities to the next level with eye catching illustrations and I can help yours too!
