Urbanek
Capabilities
Brand Startegy
Brand Identity
Package Design
Brand Architecture
Brand Communication
Turning a Well-Known Product into a Recognisable Brand.
Bracia Urbanek makes some of the best-known pickled cucumbers in Poland and sells them in more or less every shop in the country. It sells them in Mongolia, too. What it never had was a brand. Consumers knew the jars, they just didn't know they were Urbanek's.
FROM A GARAGE IN POLAND TO SHELVES IN MONGOLIA
Like a lot of great companies, this one started in a garage, winning customers one recommendation at a time. A friend of a friend in France tasted the pickled cucumbers and paid for everything upfront, giving the family enough to expand the plant and send more. Export began in the boot of a car.
Then came Mongolia, where the products travelled in the suitcases of Mongolian students studying in Poland. Poland had no ambassador in Ulaanbaatar in those years, so when the diplomatic corps gathered, the Pole in the room was often Wojciech Urbanek, a maker of preserves. In 1998, at a reception in Warsaw, Mongolia's president Natsagiin Bagabandi told a room of Polish politicians and businessmen that Mongolians knew three Polish names: Chopin, Kopernik and Urbanek. Bracia Urbanek is still a leading brand there today.
Forty years and three generations later, the quality principle the grandfather set down still hadn't changed. What still hadn't happened was for any of that history to reach the shelf. A rebrand is not a goal in itself, but if the product really is the best, there is one thing you do: you sign it.
THE SIGNATURE AND THE SEAL
We gave Urbanek what it had never had: a set of distinctive brand assets, all rooted in the family's own history. The logotype is a signature drawn from the family's own hand, and it says something very simple: Urbanek puts its name behind every product. Next to it sits a family seal that turns three generations of history into a mark a shopper can spot on the shelf.
Colour does the rest. Dark green gives the brand a premium presence and a natural tone and holds one consistent field across the whole range, while burgundy makes the signature and seal stand out. Even the lid became part of the brand: it carries a line of its own, Z góry wiadomo, że będzie dobrze – you just know it's going to be good – so the promise is right there the moment you pick up the jar.
A BILLBOARD ON THE SHELF
Urbanek doesn't sell just one kind of product, it sells dozens. So the design had to work as a system, holding up across a whole shelf at once. We built a bold nameplate that runs consistently across the range. Stand a few jars side by side and it behaves like a billboard: you recognise Urbanek from across the aisle, while each product keeps room to stand out.
BEYOND THE CUCUMBER
Urbanek is known for pickled cucumbers, but the business runs well past them. Take tomatoes: Bracia Urbanek is the largest producer of dried tomatoes in Central and Eastern Europe, which is not something anyone would guess from the name on a jar.
Then there are also: vegetable pastes, salads and vegetable mixes, preserved vegetables and mushrooms, beetroot, horseradish and ćwikła, purées and concentrates, ready meals, fermented vegetables, fruit preserves and sauerkraut. A range that wide needs a structure to hold it, so we built a brand architecture that brings every category under one name and leaves room for the ones Urbanek plans to enter next. The same identity now runs across the whole business, from jars and packshots to catalogues, presentations and everyday company materials.
After forty years of making the product, Bracia Urbanek finally put its name on it.
