Essential Wholesale & Labs is excited to release its updated branding. Our new mark pays homage to the old brand keeping the circular design with the pairing of the essential oil drop and leaf. With more emphasis on Essential in the logo, softer colors, and friendlier font, we think the new brand is more reflective of the company’s core values and its desire to be recognized as THE premium supplier of natural and organic products and ingredients.
When John Landforce was named President of Essential Wholesale & Labs in January this year, he made some positive changes to improve our business. He also challenged us to spend some time reflecting on our values and identity as a company. We began with company-wide exercises that were both thought provoking and engaging on many levels. Along the way, we discovered a renewed commitment to honor our beliefs and reaffirm our core values. Many of the employees at Essential live in typical Northwest fashion. We are in Portland, Oregon and just like the hit show, Portlandia, many of the stereotypes are true. We bike to work, we buy from local farmers at our neighborhood farmer’s markets, we reduce, reuse and recycle as much as possible. We believe what you put on your body is just as important as what you put in your body. We take pride in our healthy, tree-hugging ways so it’s not a big surprise that we practice these same values in our business.
Beyond the values of a natural and organic lifestyle, we also genuinely care about our customers and their business. Every employee here knows that our success is entirely dependent on our customer’s success. From Mike and Matt in our shipping department to Ron, our Production Planning Manager, we ask ourselves if our decisions are the right ones for our customers. We strive to reflect our core values of conservation, sustainability of resources, recycling, fair trade practices, and being good partners to our customers.
We put ourselves under the microscope and looked for ways in which our current actions support our values, and ways we could improve. Purchaser, Michelle, diligently researches when sourcing ingredients to purchase from sustainable and fair trade sources whenever possible. We have an active and robust recycling program and even more, we are committed to reducing waste by using real plates and silverware in our break rooms. We recently started using biodegradable packing materials when shipping and we are currently seeking out ways to use solar power.
As we got deeper into defining ourselves as a company, it became clear that we needed to update our branding to reflect our renewed commitment to our core values. Many companies over time discover that a brand mark that defined them in the past needs updating to better fit the present. Prime examples of brand evolution are easily recognized with the Apple brand or the Starbucks brand. Brand changes can be big, such as a completely different logo, or they can be as simple as a slight shift in messaging to communicate a more relevant brand promise. Either way, rebranding is an important decision and not one that Essential made lightly.
