Bold jewellery since 1987, given a voice loud enough for a station wall.
Big Metal London has traded since 1987 on big, characterful fashion jewellery, and the brand around it had not kept pace with the pieces. We gave it an expression as bold as the product, tested two routes in real placements, and carried the chosen direction from posters and billboards into a 280-page trade catalogue.
Trading since
Concept routes, tested in real placements
Refined direction, carried across every surface
Catalogue pages under the one brand
Bold pieces, a brand to match.
Big Metal London was known for big, characterful jewellery, and the brand around it had fallen behind the product. It needed a voice as confident as the pieces, flexible enough to run across social, retail and a full trade catalogue, and clear enough for the retail partners who sell it.
Those demands pull in different directions. A campaign poster has to stop someone in a station. A trade catalogue has to help a buyer find a code, a colourway and a size. The brief asked for one system that could do both under one voice.
Two ways to look like Big Metal.
We opened with a reference board: the colour, type and photography that felt like the brand at its most confident. It set the tone before any layout existed.
From there came two written directions, each with its own type and colour logic. The first was bold and clear, leaning on strong type and a colourful scheme. The second was more typographic and playful, with gradients and a softer, more sophisticated edge.
Two routes, taken into the world.
We pushed both routes far enough to judge them in real placements as well as on the page. The first leaned editorial, a serif voice with softer colour. The second was louder, a condensed display face built to hold a billboard or a station wall.
Seen at scale, on a street billboard and across the underground, each route could be judged on the job it would actually have to do.
The loud one, refined.
Big Metal went with the bolder route. We tightened it into a statement-led system: a condensed display voice, a palette of deep navy, magenta and violet, and full-bleed colour blocks that let a single line carry a page.
The statement pages show how it works. One line, set large, does the talking, and the jewellery sits beneath it in close, warm photography. The full system was then set out page by page as a brand document.
On the street, day and night.
The system was built to work outdoors at scale, from a run of posters on a hoarding to a lit bus stop after dark. The condensed display type and full-bleed colour were built for that distance.
From statement to SKU.
The same system carried into a product catalogue running to hundreds of lines across 280 pages. Here the job changed from making noise to making it easy to order: clean product grids, codes, colourways and sizing, all under the one brand.
The catalogue keeps the statement voice for its covers and section openers, then hands over to calm, ordered product pages where the buyer’s task comes first. It works in print and on screen, in-station.
What changed.
Big Metal came out of the work with a brand that matches the product: a direction confident enough to anchor a campaign and disciplined enough to run a catalogue of hundreds of lines without losing its voice. One voice now runs from the first page to the last.
Read it on pivitt.co.uk