Dry cleaning shops are inherently unglamorous places. They have a few distinct purposes, none of which are to be trendy. We don’t begrudge them; it’s hard to be sophisticated when your job is to banish unidentified stains from a stranger’s clothing. Their branding usually reflects this. Take a stroll around your neighborhood, and you'll probably see laundromats with haphazardly designed logos and improper use of clip art. And yet, leave it to San Francisco’s blossoming bougie tech scene to give birth to Nordic House, a dry cleaning shop that looks primed for the Jony Ive set.
Though Nordic House isn't slated to open until later this year, the shop already has a beautiful, buzzed-about visual identity, courtesy of Mexico City-based design agency Anagrama. “The client was looking towards establishing a premium laundry service shop that offered a very different experience,” says Sebastian Padilla, creative director at Anagrama.
>You get the sense that the customers who will frequent Nordic House don’t sweat.
The shop’s bespoke soaps, undershirts and dry cleaning materials are designed with a monospace, sans serif typeface paired with an chilly color palette of white, salmon and pine needle. Partnered with a slab serif typewriter typeface, the branding comes off as all business. It’s cold, minimalist and frankly, sort of aloof. But it's also beautiful.
"Our approach to Nordic House's branding was focused on Scandinavian design, combining simple geometric forms with a clean, sharp, well-distributed logotype and an icy, cold color palette,” the agency explains. The aesthetics aren’t warm—it's not meant to evoke the idea of your clothes flapping in the Italian breeze—but Nordic House’s to-the-point design and simplistic wording does make you believe your duds will not just be clean -- they’ll be better and more stylish than when you dropped them off.
Judging by branding alone, Nordic House’s message is clear: This is not a dry cleaning shop for messy people. You kind of get the sense that the customers who will frequent Nordic House don’t sweat, let alone spill tomato sauce on their pants. It’s an unusually high-brow treatment for what is traditionally known as a neighborhood-centric business. But it works. As Padilla himself admits: “It’s unusual to see these kinds of establishments around the corner, but strengthening these types of businesses with a good branding strategy will always be a great idea.”
