Fashion for penguins. Say what?
WE GOT A PROBLEM: A brand that doesn't want to be taken too seriously.
It was in a quarantine Zoom meeting, when Kostas Kaparos - the creative director of Caparo Design Crew, Myrto Papailiou - the founder of a new fashion company, and yours truly got together to start shaping Myrto's vision into a brand.
Myrto had the production logistics, the aesthetic direction and the marketing mechanics all figured out, but most of all she wanted to be clear on who she wanted to make clothes for.
Myrto wanted to design colorful clothes for people that refused to take themselves seriously. She wanted to dress the ones that carry themselves with effortless charm and refuse to have their picture re-taken in order to strike the perfect pose. Elegance is not the privilege of uptight people or dead serious pale models. You can smile or not, joke or not, be pretty or not, and still be a radiant beacon of elegance.
Heath Ledger as the Joker said it best: Why so serious?
We all agreed that the most honest value of the brand would be "playful elegance".
LET'S SOLVE THIS
When the presentation day came along, the winning name stood out from the beginning:
Adélie Pengu.
Inspired by the only animals that dress every day as sharp as it gets, in their tuxedoes, but look goofy like they just don’t give a damn, Adélie pengu is short for Adélie penguin, the most widely spread penguin species.
Dropping the -in, granted the sense of a person's name, while maintaining clearly the penguin reference.
Finally, Adélie Pengu has a ring of French elegance to it but is also full of silly&fresh “Amelie” connotations. (isn't Amelie -the iconic french movie witty character- a beautiful beacon of playful elegance?)