“It was really important to us that The Laundry’s identity was fresh, funny and appealing. Previous recycling designs have been extremely dull and by adopting the old fashioned idea of recycling that beats people over the head are off putting. Ethical Media has separated The Laundry from this legacy and is setting a new precedent for the whole of eco/sustainable design – a groundbreaking achievement.”
Ben Maxwell, The Laundry founder
We designed the identity and branding for The Laundry, a London based office paper recycling scheme, aimed at small to medium sized businesses.
The idea behind the scheme is to make recycling straightforward and simple for businesses who, because of their size, would otherwise find it impractical or too time consuming.
Participating companies leave their sacks full of paper on the kerb outside their office to be picked up by one of The Laundrys’ recycling trucks, thus providing a simple and cost effective (for the business) method of recycling.
When developing the identity, we decided to try and avoid the ‘green’ and worthy cliches that we knew existed in this field already, and go for a more humorous, bolder, copy-driven approach. This would enable us to inject the kind of personality into the brand which would appeal to the market we were aiming at.
The client also agreed that this was the best approach, and together, we all came up with copy that we thought was reasonably funny. We also designed a logo that worked with this slightly irreverent approach.
Outputs for The Laundry were wide-ranging; from kerbside and promotional plastic sacks, to stickers, to livery for the recycling trucks. This project was a success for the client and for us. They were happy with their identity and we were all very happy to have used the word ‘sex’ in a recycling scheme!