Nine Kent garden centres, one family, and a sign for every week.

A garden changes every week. The signs had stayed the same for decades, so we made a brand that changes on Mondays.

The brief

Greenwold opened its first garden centre outside Paddock Wood in 1968. The third generation now runs nine across Kent, from Faversham to Tenterden, with 410 staff. Each centre had signs from a different decade, and the website listed opening hours and little else.

The national chains were cheaper on compost and pots. What Greenwold had, and they did not, was staff who knew what to plant this week in this soil. The brief was to make that knowledge visible on site, on labels and online, before the spring.

The idea

The brand is built on the gardening week. Every centre has a board at the entrance saying what to sow, plant and prune now, changed by staff every Monday from a printed kit. The website shows the same list, and what is in flower and in stock at your nearest centre.

Around it, one system for everything else: a sturdy grotesk, moss green and a seed-packet yellow, plant labels that answer three questions in symbols, and a Garden Club card that moved from paper stamps to a number on your phone.

What we made

Identity and wordmark
Signage for nine centres, inside and out
Weekly entrance boards and staff kit
Plant label system
Website with stock by centre, designed and built
Garden Club card and sign-up

A painted timber entrance sign, plant labels, a paper bag and a membership card arranged on a potting bench in a glasshouse — Entrance sign, plant labels, bag and Garden Club card, at the Tenterden centre.

A green and yellow plant label pushed into the soil of a terracotta pot, showing simple sun and water symbols

Three questions, read from a crouch

Sun, water and final size, in symbols large enough to read at the height of a bench. Twelve thousand labels were replaced over one winter, printed on recycled board that lasts a season outdoors.

How the mark moves

Each letter turns like a seed packet flipped over to read the back, a beat behind the one before. It runs on the screens by every till.

A long glasshouse aisle of flowering plants at opening time, low sun through the glass — The Faversham glasshouse at opening time on a Monday in April.

What changed

Garden Club members, up from 9,400
Eighteen months after launch. Most sign up at the till in under a minute.
spend per visit in the first spring
Across all nine centres, with the same opening hours and staffing as the spring before.
centres re-signed in eleven weeks
Installed between November and January, without closing a centre for a day.

Who made it

Orvel

Anjali RaoCreative directionLondon
Tomás FerreiraIdentity and signageLisbon
Freya LundStrategy and websiteLondon

With

Client team: Sarah Greenwold, Mark Greenwold, Dee Akintola
Signage: Weald Sign Works, Ashford
Plant labels: Medway Label Co.
Photography: Hattie Lowe
Website development: Orvel engineering

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