We’re at an interesting juncture when it comes to the petcare category – especially when it comes to dogs. Long gone are the days of barbour jackets and wellies, whistles, and gargantuan cans of Winalot; but we’ve also (thankfully) started to leave behind the whole ‘fur baby’ thing – the nauseating ‘cockapoo mommy’ era that ushered in things like nail varnish for dogs or bandanas that read, “My Mom is Sooooo Obsessed with Me”.
Now, it seems, dogcare has entered a less horrendous phase – if one that’s still erring rather on the side of humanising our hounds. As Mexican design agency Brands & People, which just rebranded petcare brand Mutt puts it, “Today, pet owners care for their companions as they care for themselves – seeking better ingredients, thoughtful routines, and deeper meaning”.
Brands & People continues, “Mutt’s ambition was to become the first pet wellness brand that reflects this new mindset – one that matched the emotional bond between humans and their life companions”.
The agency faced two main challenges: the first was that the former brand architecture was fragmented, the second was that Mutt was perceived as a “small, artisanal brand”. Both of these were limiting its ability to scale and compete in mass retail.
I’m not sure what the previous branding looked like, but I do know that this new look feels primed for both the ‘pet wellness’ audience and mass retail shelves. It’s fun but trustworthy; cute but not saccharine; bright but not lurid as to not be taken seriously.
According to Brands & People, the new look was inspired by “the visual language of human wellness”; aiming to develop a “graphic system that balances clarity and sophistication”. This makes sense, but what works superbly are the cheeky details that make Mutt so doggedly dog-centric.
Namely, that’s the wordmark. Set in a beefy, playful display font, it comes to life in its animated form where the negative spaces (in the ‘m’ for instance) morph into little wagging tails. Clarity and sophistication, yes, but also – crucially – dogs.
The wordmark flexes beautifully across all applications: on packaging, online, across social, on merch such as t-shirts and tote bags. One of the main reasons it works so well is that Brands & People has been so adept in knowing when to dial things up and when to pare them back.
The supporting fonts are charming but unintrusive: Linotype’s Helvetica and ITC Garamond Std in its Light Condensed weight. These very classic fonts are complemented by a slightly more outre choice in Fragment Mono, a monospaced coding version of Helvetica created by modifying and extending Nimbus Sans by type foundry URW.
The colour palette is chipper, perky, effortlessly hip and you can really see the thinking around aligning with human wellness categories coming into play here. It largely revolves around powdery shades of pink, lavender and peachy oranges; as well as black and a couple of shades of grey.
The graphic system is based around the use of four clearly defined shapes that act as both graphic devices and lockups for information – a circle, a rectangle, an elongated octagon and a lozenge shape. These provide a sense of order across various different products in the range and underscore that central sense of clarity and simplicity, which allows other elements to come to the fore (again, namely all those lovely dogs).
Speaking of those lovely dogs, I’m a big fan of the art direction, too: the photography is crisp and clear, shunning anything overtly cutesy and instead using cutouts of the dogs to show their personalities while maintaining a brand that conveys trust and care rather than fluffy pampering vibes.
“Rather than portraying pets as animals, we treated them as life companions,” says Brands & People. This new identity reflects that beautifully: in an era where pet care is no longer purely functional but deeply emotional, Mutt’s brand has been elevated beyond traditional pet food, reimagined as a wellness brand, attuned to how many owners truly feel about their animals.
