Fashion Retail Academy - Rebranding

Description

The Fashion Retail Academy is an academic institution based in the centre of London. The college was borne by industry giants and founders – from M&S, NEXT, F&F, Arcadia and backed by UK government funding – with the desire to protect the future of the Fashion & Retail industry. It is considered to be one of the best fashion colleges in the UK, boasting a successful alumni cohort and prestigious industry connections.

Challenge

Since the brand’s inception in 2005, under the name ‘National Skills Academy’, and much like the fashion industry, the brand has undergone a number of transformations over the years. The brand was again in need of a refresh, and had started to look outdated from its previous visual identity.

FRA were also struggling to apply the visual identity flexibly across multiple platforms and ultimately the challenge was inflexibility, which resulted in creative inconsistencies.

They were in need of robust, yet easy-to-use, creative branding to bring FRA into the now, and to be truly fashion forward.

Solution

We refreshed the brand, by bringing it back to basics, and focused on appealing to its core audience of 16–21 year olds (Gen Z audience). We focused on clean, yet powerful styles to bring the brand away from complexity and into modernity. We created a unique orange colourway for FRA, which was synonymous with them, ownable, future looking and recognisable, alongside a striking font and photography style.

A robust brand and a style guide were developed for FRA to use internally and externally to ensure creative application was consistent across all formats, on and offline – useful and useable for anyone to adopt. After establishing the refreshed creative identity, we worked with the FRA team to produce a suite of assets to begin the brand roll-out, this included: OOH assets (6-sheets, street liners, supersides), event boards, banners and collateral, direct mail postcards, office signage, website layout, email and social headers, brochures, a prospectus brochure and brand videos.