Duluth Trading Company
Creative and Art Direction, Identity, Graphic Design, Copywriting
Paper Robot’s entire team has extensive experience working on the Duluth Trading brand, including several years of working closely together on major initiatives. Although art directors and writers have a lot of freedom, all creative has to nail Duluth’s very specific feel—something only achieved through talent and a fine-tuned understanding of the brand.
Verónica is entrusted with fast-turn design and art direction projects that require utmost creativity and precision. She is often tasked with pushing boundaries to create brand-right work that pushes the company’s overall creative vision forward.
Greer and Victoria played an integral role in creating and evolving the women’s voice while maintaining Duluth’s legendary irreverence and humor. Both have written thousands of words for Duluth’s men’s and women’s brands, including everything from product copy to brand-level campaign concepts.
Select Work for Duluth Trading Company
Deck the Halls & All the Merry You Can Carry
When the agency tasked with this project failed to deliver high-quality results, Paper Robot was called in to assist on an accelerated timeline. As part of Duluth’s holiday gifting campaign, our creative director concepted and designed an eye-catching badge and corresponding toolkit to be deployed across all channels. The badge featured spirited flourishes to capture the spirit of the season, and we created it in three different colors.
This creative was anticipated to last for just one season, but it was such a success that it ran for multiple. When Duluth did decide to refresh their gift giving tagline to “All the Merry You Can Carry”, they went straight to Paper Robot for identity work.
Winter Wonders
As part of a sub-campaign aimed at selling cold-weather accessories and apparel, Paper Robot was asked to create a visual identity that could be added to catalog, web and email assets. Our creative director crafted a design that mimics the wonder and beauty of the aurora borealis by designing a clean type lockup imbued with movement and art directing a hand-drawn borealis background illustrated by Mark Dambach.
Duluth Shop Clock
After not having a shop clock for 15 years, Duluth asked Paper Robot to create a new static clock face design. Thanks to our creative director’s deep knowledge of the brand, we knew that pushing the envelope in the right way could be a big hit for internal stakeholders and Duluth fans alike.
Our creative director decided to make Buck (the illustrated underwear spokesperson from Duluth’s ads) the star, using his legs as moving clock hands while he swung around on a sawhorse. Paper Robot created functional paper prototypes as proof-of-concept, and worked through a few iterations to get the motion of the legs just right. We also made thoughtful judgment calls, like removing the clock’s second hand.
Paper Robot’s outside-the-box creativity and detail-oriented approach resulted in a fun piece that elevated the brand. It was released in limited-edition quantities and sold out in a flash.
