How We Built a Fragrance Brand Around Two Grandmothers and a Whole Lot of Curiosity
A good brand identity is a system of decisions that all point back to one thing: making a business instantly understandable and impossible to confuse. Rosemary & May, a niche fragrance boutique in Toronto, is a real example of that process start to finish, from the strategy work most people skip to the final handoff.
You know that feeling when you just know something magical is about to happen? That was the feeling I had when I met Tamara Korolnek and Crystal Short.
Halfway through their discovery call, I learned they were naming their business after their grandmothers, to honour those fierce, beautiful personalities. My own agency is named after my grandmother too, so I knew right away this project was going to have some extra magic in it.
Rosemary & May is the niche fragrance boutique that came out of that conversation, a Toronto shop curating independently crafted perfume brands you genuinely cannot find anywhere else in the city. My job was to build a brand identity that could hold all of that: taste level, warmth, and enough personality that a stranger could tell them apart from every other beauty brand in their feed.
I build every identity project toward one standard. Not "make it pretty." Make it unmistakable. A logo somebody could sketch from memory. A palette that does the talking before the copy does. Here is how that actually came together for Rosemary & May, and what it took to get there.
The questionnaire phase is where the real work happens
Tamara and Crystal told me it was the hardest part of the project, and I mean it when I say that is exactly what I want to hear.
That phase is where a brand stops being a vibe and starts being a decision. Who is this actually for? What does "luxury" mean for a fragrance boutique specifically, not luxury in general? What does the brand need to say before a customer reads a single word of copy?
Skip it, and you get a nice-looking logo with nothing holding it up. Do it properly and every decision after that gets faster, because you're no longer guessing.
Every design choice had a job to do
The full identity landed on a Lily of the Valley icon, a hand-influenced ampersand as the secondary mark, a primary logo suite, and a colour palette named after fragrance notes: patchouli, mimosa, peony, tuberose, iris.
The icon had to work on its own, on packaging, on a social grid, on a swing tag, without the wordmark attached. The ampersand is where the two founders live in the brand visually, not just in an About page paragraph, because this is a two-founder business and the mark needed to carry that. The colours had to feel layered the way a well-built fragrance smells, opening, heart, dry-down, instead of five shades that simply looked nice next to each other.
If a design decision can't answer "why this, and not something else," it's decoration. I don't ship decoration.
Handoff is where you find out if the work actually holds
A brand identity project isn't done when the logo gets approved. It's done when the client can run their own Instagram grid without texting me first.
Tamara and Crystal described working together in one word: productive. The guidelines matched the vision they already had for the business, and watching the final logo come together was, in their words, a genuinely good surprise, "how beautiful it turned out." That's the bar. Not a nice file. A toolkit two founders can actually use without me.
What a strong brand identity does for a business
A good identity has to travel. Onto a storefront, a website, packaging, a product photo, every place a stranger meets the brand before they've smelled a single bottle or read a line of copy.
Tamara and Crystal put it plainly: the project helped solidify their vision for Rosemary & May. Not invent it. Solidify it. The vision was already there in how they talked about their own business.
My job was giving it a system that could carry weight everywhere it showed up.
FAQs
What's the difference between a logo and a full brand identity?
A logo is one asset. A brand identity is the full system behind it, colour palette, typography, icon usage, tone, and guidelines, built so every touchpoint of a business feels unmistakably like it, not just the homepage.
Why does the workshop phase matter so much in branding?
Because design decisions made without real clarity on the business end up generic. The questionnaire phase is where a brand strategist figures out what actually needs to be true about the brand before any visual work starts.
If your brand is more "pretty" than "unmistakable," that's a strategy gap. Discovery calls are open. 💗
