Backroad Boulevard: A Home Décor Brand With A Story Behind Every Piece
Home Décor Retail
Wichita, Kansas
Brand Strategy, Visual Identity, Website Design, Content
A Shop Full of Stories. A Brand to Tell Them.
Backroad Boulevard is a Wichita home décor shop: curated furnishings, antiques, kitchenware and seasonal pieces, most of them with a little history behind them. Owner Vonda came to us for a rebrand that could carry that across a storefront, a website and every social feed.
By the end of discovery, the whole brand fit in one line: curated home décor for adventurers, with a story behind every piece.
Six Words, Then One Sentence.
CORE Discovery breaks a brand into six parts: its culture, its customer, its voice, how it should feel, the impact it has and the X-factor nobody else can claim. Vonda picked a lead word for each one.
Quality
Adventurous
Innovative
Driven to decorate
Ideas into reality
Products with stories
“Backroad Boulevard provides curated home décor to adventurers seeking unique products with an innovative voice, helping them feel driven to decorate and turn ideas into reality.”
The CORE Discovery recap, January 2022: brand messaging, the cover and goal alignment
Three Shoppers. Three Different Asks.
We wrote three customer profiles. Each one wanted something different from the shop, and every one of those wants ended up on the homepage.
Laurel, 28
Renting downtown, saving for a house and finishing law school. She shops online and learns from blog posts full of staged rooms and color ideas.
Teresa
Kids grown, kitchen always busy, house always getting a refresh. She will spend, but only after she has done her homework.
Madison
Hosts often, never repeats a season’s décor and has bought the most expensive piece on a site just because she could.
And where people would find it: the website, Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest.
Three Roads. One Direction.
We built three stylescapes, each a full panorama of type, color, texture and photography. Vonda chose C: vintage letterforms, hand-drawn details and a deep, earthy green. The refinement brought in Royal Blue, and that pairing became the brand.
Direction A of 3
Direction B of 3
Direction C of 3
Five Marks. One Sprig.
Five first-round concepts, from a stand of watercolor pines to a bold, blocky B. Vonda picked C: a traditional serif wordmark with a line that loops through BOULEVARD. In refinement we crowned it with a hand-drawn sprig and a scatter of dots, so the established type gets a free-spirited, whimsical side.
A
B
C · Their pick
D
E
Concept C-2, the final mark, and the secondary badges built from its sprig and B
Royal Blue, Summer Green And Plenty Of Breathing Room.
Royal Blue is professional and calm. Summer Green is adventurous and friendly. Deep Blue and Sandstone keep everything grounded, and the colors stay minimal so the products do the talking. Famous sets the headlines in open, uppercase letterforms, with Barlow Condensed and Open Sans doing the rest.
Brand guidelines · Primary logo
Brand guidelines · Typography
Brand guidelines · Secondary badges
Brand guidelines · Unacceptable usage
Business cards, front and back
“A room should feel collected, not decorated.”
A Homepage Built For All Three Shoppers.
The website design reads like a walk through the shop, in the brand’s own blues and greens. Even the hero has a little whimsy: move across the living room and the light fades from morning coffee to evening candles.
Morning in · coffee on
Evening in · candles lit
Shop by room. Shop by season.
Six room panels and limited seasonal runs, so the collector can go straight to the space she is dressing or the season she will never repeat.
The detail she researches for.
New and featured pieces lead with the material, the maker and the price, so a careful shopper has what she needs before she adds to the bag.
A journal that teaches.
Style Notes turns the blog into a reason to come back: how-tos, makers and rooms, each with a read time.
On a phone: the hero, the rooms and the porch-list invitation
Then We Gave It An Audience.
Pinterest was on the awareness list from day one. In 2023 we ran Backroad Boulevard’s account: daily pins tied to products and boards, seven blog posts with a set of pins for each, and a cleanup of the product listings so every pin landed somewhere worth landing.
Blog pins for fall decor, color palettes, bedrooms and bookshelves
From 794 in April to 1.75K in June
From 447 to 1.27K people reached
Each with its own set of pins
Every pin needs a page worth landing on.
Product listings got new descriptions, alt text and SEO titles, plus extra photos and category fixes. Where a supplier shot fell flat, we restyled it to match the brand.
Supplier photo
Restyled listing photo
From A Rebrand To A Brand People Pin.
Backroad Boulevard came out of it with a brand built on its X-factor, a homepage designed around real shoppers and a content engine that kept new people finding the shop.
Every piece in the shop has a story. Now the brand does too.