Making merchandise worth giving a damn about
Nerds are a small team of self-confessed merchandise nerds who care an awful lot about making really good stuff. From T-shirts and tote bags to bottles and branded gifts, their mission is pretty simple: to create thoughtful, sustainable merchandise that people actually want to keep.
But when we first started working together, there was a small problem. The business had outgrown its own name, and the branding wasn’t quite telling the story of the people behind it.
What followed was one of the most joyful identity projects I’ve had the pleasure of working on. A world of smiling characters, nostalgic illustrations and a whole lot of yellow, all built around one very simple idea.
Make things people cherish, not chuck.
A business bigger than its T-shirts
Before Nerds became Nerds, they were known as T-shirt Nerds. And while that name had served them well in the early days, it had started to become a bit of a problem.
Nerds weren’t just making T-shirts anymore. Their ambitions were much bigger than that. They wanted to create all sorts of beautifully considered merchandise, helping businesses make better choices about the products they put their names on.
The trouble was, when you’ve got T-shirt in your name, people are naturally going to assume that’s all you do.
So this project was about much more than giving an existing business a shiny new logo. We needed to rethink how Nerds presented themselves to the world, creating an identity that reflected what they were doing today while giving them the freedom to become whatever they wanted tomorrow.
And importantly, we needed to make sure we didn’t solve one problem by accidentally creating another.
Serious about merch. Not so serious about themselves.
One of the things I absolutely loved about the team at Nerds was just how much they genuinely cared.
They cared about their customers. They cared about the people they worked with. They cared about making beautiful products that wouldn’t end up in landfill six months later. And they really, really cared about making good merchandise.
Hence the name. They’re nerds for this stuff.
But what stood out to me most during our early conversations wasn’t necessarily the products they made. It was the people making them.
Nerds are a small, tight-knit team who clearly love what they do. They’re relaxed, approachable, full of personality and, above all else, genuinely good human beings. There was a real sense of joy in the way they spoke about their work, their customers and each other.
If these are the people behind the business, why shouldn’t the brand feel exactly the same?
We didn’t need to make Nerds look like some enormous, polished corporate merchandise company. We needed to make them look like Nerds.
Friendly. Playful. And incredibly good at what they do.
Meet Ned. The nerd with absolutely no idea what he is.
Meet Ned.
A big, smiley, slightly ridiculous little character with a pair of nerdy glasses, a baseball cap and a whole lot of personality.
The idea was to create a mascot that represented everything I’d come to love about the people behind Nerds. Something friendly, approachable, full of joy and just a little bit nostalgic. A cool nerd, if you will.
But there’s something quite important about Ned that you might not notice at first. He isn’t actually anything.
He’s not a T-shirt. He’s not a bottle. He’s not a tote bag. He’s just this wonderfully odd little blob of happiness.
And that was entirely intentional.
Remember how the original name, T-shirt Nerds, had started to limit people’s understanding of the business? Well, the last thing I wanted to do was create a new logo that would eventually cause exactly the same problem.
By giving Ned a character without tying him to a particular product or industry, we created something that could grow alongside the business.
Whether Nerds spend the next ten years making merchandise or decide to explore something completely different, Ned can come along for the ride.
Giving the things we throw away a little personality.
One of Nerds’ biggest beliefs is that merchandise should be cherished, not chucked. And I thought there was something really lovely about that.
Because let’s face it, we’ve all been given promotional merchandise that we didn’t particularly want. A cheap pen, a flimsy tote bag or a T-shirt that was never going to leave the bottom of the wardrobe. Nerds wanted to do things differently. They wanted to make thoughtful, sustainable products that people would actually enjoy owning.
So I started thinking about how we could communicate that idea through the visual identity itself. What if the merchandise wasn’t just merchandise?
What if we could bring it to life?
Taking inspiration from Ned, I began developing a whole little family of illustrated characters based on the products Nerds were creating. Tote bags, T-shirts, bottles and other everyday objects suddenly had smiling faces, little arms and legs, and personalities of their own.
The thinking was simple. It’s a lot harder to throw something away when it feels like a little character you’ve grown attached to. Of course, we weren’t expecting people to start having emotional relationships with their water bottles. But by bringing these everyday objects to life, we could turn a pretty ordinary product category into something much more memorable, playful and human.
It was a fun way of telling a much bigger story about making things worth keeping.
