Degla Meat

Making freshness visible

Client: Degla Meat
Sector: FMCG — meat retail
Role: Identity, packaging and campaign design

A butcher's brand has one job before any other: look like the meat is fresh.

Shown as portfolio work — client details available on request.

The brief

Degla Meat is a working butcher — high turnover, walk-in trade, delivery. The brand already existed and already worked in the way that matters: customers recognised it and trusted it.

The task was to bring consistency to it without losing the familiar, direct and dependable character it already had. That constraint is the whole job. A rebrand that makes a neighbourhood butcher look like a design studio’s idea of a butcher loses the thing the business was actually trading on.

The idea

A butcher’s brand has one job before any other: look like the meat is fresh.

Four values run through the system — freshness, clarity, trust, everyday value — and the first one is doing most of the work. Red against black and white reads as fresh before a customer has consciously read anything.

Project overview board — the challenge and response set against the four brand values: freshness, clarity, trust, everyday value

The mark

A cleaver and a cow, locked into a badge with the name in both scripts — Degla Meat and جزارة دجلة. Direct, legible at a glance, and unembarrassed about what the business does.

Visual identity board — the red, black and white palette with the bilingual lockup

The system has to scale from a sticker to a box

This is where a retail identity is actually tested. The same system has to survive being printed at 30 mm on a label stuck to a tray and at full size on a delivery box, on different stocks, by different suppliers.

Packaging sketches — early exploration of the pack formats before any of them were built

The sticker and label system — the smallest application, where the mark has least room and most work to do

Paper bag mockup in red and black with the badge centred

Family box mockup — the largest pack format, carrying the same badge and information hierarchy

Tray sleeve mockup — the sleeve that organises product information at the point of sale

Everyday communication, not campaign photography

A butcher posts several times a week, forever. So the social system is built to be filled in rather than art-directed each time: a recipe format, a weekly offer format, and a story format.

Recipe carousel — a repeatable social format built to be refilled weekly

Weekly offer post — price-led layout with the information hierarchy fixed in advance

Story campaign frame — the vertical format carrying the same red-black-white system

What shipped

An identity, a packaging line from label to delivery box, and a repeatable social system — all bilingual, all in one red, black and white language.