The Brand Identity – Home of the Greatest in Graphic & Brand Design

Ellis Butchers is a pair of sustainable, whole-carcass butcher shops in Blackheath, southeast London. Founder Nick Ellis acquired two long-standing shops at once, one in Blackheath Village and one in Blackheath Standard, each with its own neighbourhood to answer to, and he wanted both to belong to one premium parent brand. For the strategy and identity that would bring them together, Ellis turned to London-based brand agency Studio Blackburn, which resolved the split with an idea it calls ‘Seriously Playful.’

Studio Blackburn treated the job as a question of architecture: one parent, Ellis Butchers, sitting above two shops with deliberately different personalities for two different local audiences. The Village leans into heritage, trading from premises with more than a century of butchery behind them; the Standard is pitched as the younger, more contemporary sister. Both defer to a parent that stands for ethical sourcing, minimal waste and whole-carcass butchery.

Butcher branding tends to rely on a narrow and well-worn toolkit: the meat cut chart, the livestock silhouette, vintage engraving and gold-leaf signwriting. Studio Blackburn set most of it aside. “We always look closely at the sector vernacular before starting a project, and then we try to rip up the rulebook without alienating people,” Creative Director Mark Jones tells us. The studio “ruled out default options like livestock silhouettes and cut charts immediately,” he explains, “because they represent the path of least resistance,” leaving no cut chart anywhere in the finished system. “The Blackheath Village shop earned the right to keep its historic architectural soul, but the graphics needed to feel entirely fresh,” Jones adds. In place of the ruled-out livestock and cut charts, the studio made the product itself the star, humanising the meat rather than the animal it came from.

The Village has a traditional green, tiling and a classic logotype; the Standard has bold lettering and a vibrant orange. Each shop is set in its own typeface, chosen for what Jones sums up as “a distinct, structural sharpness that felt right for a butcher.” The Village uses Dinamo’s ABC Gaisyr, which he calls “sharp but very traditional, with a monospaced, typewriter-like quality,” while the Standard uses Displaay’s Bagoss, “fat, chunky” with “incredibly aggressive, sharp cuts that feel modern and immediate.”

The green does an unusual job for a sustainable food brand, where the colour usually announces ecology. Here it derives from the Village’s traditional tiling and signals heritage instead. “The client actually really wanted traditional green tiles from the very beginning,” Jones reveals. “To us, it felt traditional and ornately British, like a classic Aston Martin racing green,” he continues, “and if people also read it as a modern sustainability cue, that is a very happy accident.”

Beyond the shared parent and a cast of meaty characters that appear at both shops, the two stay separate online, each running its own Instagram account. “Colloquially, if you live near the Village or the Standard, you probably just refer to it as ‘the butcher,’” Jones reasons. “The social split is purely practical.” The accounts trade in weekend counter specials rather than a curated lifestyle. “If you live locally, you only follow the shop you actually visit,” he points out.

At the head of that cast is Meat Ellis. Around him, they turn the product into a company of characters, each a cut of meat set on a pair of legs. “For a traditional trade like this, giving meat some legs felt fun, wholesome and completely unexpected,” Jones notes. “Once we drew him, we just allowed the idea to spiral.”

The cast appears across the packaging and the merchandise, and for the launch, Studio Blackburn got the characters moving in a brand film. “We initially created the moving elements to sell the concept to the client and announce the brand to the world,” Jones reveals. “The identity works perfectly in static form on a piece of greaseproof paper, but having the opportunity to make the characters actually move brought a whole new layer of energy to the launch.”

“You have to design with primary function in mind,” Jones concludes; adding that everything “needed to be durable and food-safe, but that did not stop us having fun with it. We nailed the basic retail functions first and then injected the play,” an approach he ties to the studio’s WORKPLAY ethos.