Happy Home Incense™ is a brand of hand-crafted incense made by Oxford, Ohio-based Wild Berry Incense, and sold in Walmart nationwide. For this iteration of the Happy Home Incense branding we scrapped the previous branding which was more illustration-based, and opted to create a beautiful product photo to be used on all of the packages. We worked with one of Cincinnati’s best product photographers to capture the brand essence and mood of the product, then set out to create the different SKUs to be sold at Walmart. We collaborated with Wild Berry, as well as with input from Walmart, to create a really nice set of package designs that were then printed, packed, and began selling nationwide.
Happy Home Incense Packaging and Branding
By Brand Shepherd | Published January 2nd, 2012Attention Businesses: Be Social
By Brand Shepherd | Published November 22nd, 2011Preface about our language: Brand Shepherd’s philosophy is Your Brand Is Everything, meaning that everything your business does or creates – and all the myriad working parts that surround and support it – is your brand. So when we talk about your brand, we’re not talking in the old limited scope of a consumer product. We’re talking about what any business does or creates. Your Brand Is Everything has a double meaning, too, in that your brand is everything to your business – without it you have no business. Everything is riding on what your business does or creates (i.e., does = service, creates = product). So as you read this, you now know the context we’re talking within.
By now your business is using social media. If not, stop reading this, and contact us so we can direct you to a social media pro to get you started. If your business is one week or several years into the social media game, you have encountered frustrations and victories. Maybe you have even figured out a metric to measure the ROI of your social media efforts.
RecycleStream Website
By Brand Shepherd | Published July 21st, 2011RecycleStream.com has a pretty basic premise: It matches your waste with those who want it (paraphrase of tag line). Digging a hole in your yard for a new pool? Log on to find the property owner who needs fill. Municipality manager in need of land owners who want your fill from projects? Find them here. The concept is brilliant because it falls right in line with the times we live in: We no longer want to waste anything! Brand Shepherd journeyed through the creation process on this project with Snow Commerce’s client to mainly focus on the user interface design (UI) so as to make it as intuitive as possible. The website project began as DumpsitesNow.com, but later in the process a new name – RecycleStream.com – was chosen because it more accurately described the myriad services that the business model can accommodate.
Below are 2 images: What the site looks like now, and also the first concept we designed for DumpSitesNow.com, a concept that everyone really liked, though it was heavily evolved into what we now see at RecycleStream’s website.
North Central Cyclery Business Cards
By Brand Shepherd | Published May 30th, 2011It was a trifecta of branding projects: North Central Cyclery hired Brand Shepherd to design their new website, new van graphics, and new business cards. The key to business cards these days is to be consistent with your branding, and use the space appropriately for your industry. Just because you can print on both sides inexpensively doesn’t mean you should. If you write notes or info on the back of cards, keep the back blank. In NCC’s case, a double-sided card was perfect. It provided space to let the design breathe, and everything is totally consistent with their branding.
North Central Cyclery Van Wrap
By Brand Shepherd | Published May 30th, 2011In tandem with their new website and business cards that we designed, North Central Cyclery hired Brand Shepherd to design a few options for graphics on the van they take to races, shows, events, etc. We created 3 options, 1 of which is shown below, and execution of the chosen design was handled by a vehicle graphics professional service. We see this as a great example of a business hiring design and branding professionals in order to keep brand consistency a priority, and then hire the vendor to execute the ideas. Sometimes the shops that claim to design and do production oriented tasks are average at both. Businesses who are focused on branding excellence do not settle for average.
Turning Point Marketing Sell Sheet
By Brand Shepherd | Published May 30th, 2011Turning Point Marketing hired Brand Shepherd to design a simple, yet thoroughly informative, sell sheet that would look sharp when printed, but provided in a final file size that could be easily emailed. What we created was a sell sheet that is totally consistent with Turning Point Marketing’s other branded touch points, and can also be updated with new information to be re-purposed. Very cost-effective use of a branded sales tool for both print and email purposes.
Dinovite Website
By Brand Shepherd | Published May 30th, 2011Visit the site: Dinovite.com
Dinovite has been with us from the start, and we enjoy love working on their stuff. When Brand Shepherd had sufficient e-commerce website design experience using Magento under our belt, we approached Dinovite about refreshing (not redesigning) their website. They graciously allowed us to pitch our vision of a refreshed Dinovite.com, and from that pitch we realized we had the same brand-integrated vision for the site. Work began on creating a website that, for the most part, wasn’t a design overhaul, yet it made subtle changes that would improve the user experience, and add in a few new features, too.
We don’t want to give away too much of the process that went into the project, but a few highlights are: Integrating image sliders at strategic and helpful places on important pages, Creating a large dynamic footer that showed recent tweets and articles, integrating more social media onto every page, creating the new Articles section, and refining the layout to make for a better user experience.
It’s worth noting that this website blends both Magento and WordPress. We use Magento for all pages related to e-commerce, and WordPress for the new Articles section. Both platforms carry a heavy load of information, but both are very easy to access and maintain for Dinovite. Our development partners did a great job of meshing Magento and WordPress together so that users don’t even notice when going between platforms.
The end result is a new website for Dinovite that informs, sells, and has lots of room for growth.
[Be sure to check out our Dinovite story, too!]
Morgan County, Ohio CVB Website
By Brand Shepherd | Published May 30th, 2011Visit the website right now: VisitMorganCountyOhio.com
The Morgan County, Ohio CVB website is one spoke in a wheel of branding projects they hired Brand Shepherd to create and manage. The branding initiatives began by spending several days in Morgan County, Ohio, getting to know the sites, attractions, scenery, and people. From that we created their new brand identity. Out of the brand identity we created several key branded tools to help attract people to the area for visits, one of which is a new website.
The website’s look, feel, and aesthetic were born directly out of the initial branding exercises we went through to figure what the Morgan County, Ohio brand looked and felt like. Brand Shepherd designed 3 initial home page concepts, each a different take on the core branding, and from those 3 one was chosen to create the website from.
We designed and built the website for WordPress. This allows the CVB to use their time and money very efficiently – they can posts events on an integrated events calendar, create pages for specific attractions, and make it super easy for guests to interact with the CVB. We designed a website that accomplishes two goals. First, it continues to build and reinforce the brand we initially established. Second, it is a beautiful user experience that doesn’t nest information guests want in hard-to-find places. The end
Na & Associates CPA Website
By Brand Shepherd | Published May 30th, 2011Visit the website right now: NaCPA.com
Na & Associates CPA has trusted Brand Shepherd with their branding for several years, and when it came time to update their website we were honored to work with this fine organization again. This website presented us an opportunity to work with a company Na CPA had hired some years previously to help generate and manage content specific to CPAs. It became clear that using one of this third-party business’s website layouts would be the most cost-efficient approach for Na CPA. Brand Shepherd’s job would be to take the stock layout, and brand it so that every touch point maintained the branding we had previously worked hard to establish. The final result is a website that really helps the Na CPA brand go to a new level of professionalism. There are no other CPAs in their competitive market who have a website like Na CPA – it stands head and shoulders above the competition.
North Central Cyclery Website
By Brand Shepherd | Published May 30th, 2011Visit the website right now: NorthCentralCyclery.com
North Central Cyclery (NCC) has been gracious to hire Brand Shepherd for various projects, and over the years we built up enough trust for them to hire us to recreate their website. NCC’s vision for the site was to take it from it’s previously static information state, into a more dynamic information place where each day you visited the website you would encounter new information about cycling. Their branding has been beautiful from the beginning, so our job was simply to continue applying it to a new website that felt as wide-open as the prairies of north-central Illinois, where they are based. We designed and developed the new website for WordPress, and now NCC can post updates daily and integrate those posts with their social media. They still have the static information pages that customers want, but they also have a new website that has become a destination for cycling enthusiasts.


