True Reverie
The Opportunity
Wolverhampton 2019.
With the football club back and thriving in the Premier League, 3.7 billion pounds of investment in regeneration projects citywide, a high creation and survival rate for new businesses, a recent ranking as one of the top UK cities to raise a family and having been recently voted top City in Europe for creating manufacturing jobs, Wolverhampton is very much a city on the up.
With a renewed sense of local pride, optimism and confidence in the future, there is no better time to celebrate and embrace what makes this city great.
The Solution
True Reverie is a Wolverhampton-based, fashion and lifestyle brand set up by myself and my husband Tim.
The brand seeks to tell, and celebrate the story of people of Wolverhampton and the West Midlands region, through high end clothing and art that contains an empowering narrative about the region’s cultural life.
All of our products are designed and printed locally with passion and pride.
The brand identity is a bold mark which references the city’s manufacturing past through graphic constructs which are reminiscent of industrial buildings. The revolving type alludes to regeneration and progress. A warm yellow and soft blue create a contemporary colour palette.
The logo needed to be flexible in order for it to work across multiple brand touch-points including an online store, packaging, as a printed inner neck label on all t-shirts, and on promotional material.
Art direction for photography for the brand is considered key, and we have ensured that photoshoots take place in Wolverhampton and reinforce our message of optimism and diversity.
The brand launched with the debut t-shirt design Good as Gold. The design captures the spirit of the people who worked in the city’s iconic tyre plant Goodyear, who also sponsored Wolverhampton Wanderers FC for 12 years. It was inspired by my dad Bob Wiggin who worked at Goodyear for 25 years and was a turnstile operator at Molineux for 6 years during the Jack Hayward era.
The positive slogan is screenprinted in a redrawn version of the Goodyear typeface on a variety of t-shirt colourways. We have high ethical standards, with all t-shirts made from 100% organic and sustainable fairwear cotton and hand screenprinted with water based inks.
An online store was designed and built as the main point of sale for all products, along with bespoke campaign designs for key social channels.
We then went on to launch our Midlands Musique collection of t-shirts, which celebrate the amazing music genres and scenes which we’ve grown up with and been influenced by in the West Midlands. Each design is crafted to reference the specific genre, taking inspiration from imagery and typography which features on memorabilia of the time, whilst adding a contemporary twist.
To launch this collection we ran a campaign calling for people’s stories and memories of music culture in our city in order to shine a light on Wolverhampton’s great musical heritage. Photography and key quotes are combined to create a wall of memories which created a vibrant and memorable social media campaign. This has since evolved into the Wolverhampton Music Archive, a new online archive for the people of Wolverhampton (past and present) which will keep alive the memories of our collective musical past and inspire future generations.
In the space of just one year we can count world-famous Premier League footballers (Raul Jimenez, Diogo Jota, Connor Coady, Morgan Gibbs-White) and legendary musicians (Tito Jackson, John Robb, Clint Mansell) as supporters and customers of our brand.
We also regularly curate unique music and fashion pop-up events in the city, bringing local creatives, designer-makers and musicians together to showcase local talent, aswell as offering a truly unique retail opportunity within independent venues on the high street. Through these events we have helped to raise £1,300 for worthy charities in the city in 2019/20.
We have recently taken all printing production in-house, so that our products are designed and screen printed completely in-house in Wolverhampton, helping to reduce our carbon footprint as a business.
