Brand Identity • Web Design • Packaging • Email Marketing • Social Media Management
Peppermint Pup
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About Peppermint Pup
Peppermint Pup was a handmade goods shop built for dog people — the kind who coordinate their dog’s accessories and don’t apologize for it. The shop sold dog bandanas, dog-themed handmade journals, and custom-designed tees, moving between local markets and booths across Arizona and an online storefront. It was also my own side business, which made the product brand identity design work a little different: I was both the designer and the client.
What Designing for Yourself Actually Requires
Every new business starts invisible. No reputation, no audience, no visual shorthand that tells a stranger what you sell before they ever pick up a product. For a handmade goods shop that had to work in two completely different environments — a market booth on a Saturday morning and someone’s phone screen at midnight — that invisibility was more than a branding gap. It was a revenue problem.
Before I designed anything, I put myself through the Brand Ignition Blueprint. The same process I run with every client: discovery, brand voice, customer clarity, positioning. Sitting on the other side of it is humbling in ways I didn’t expect. Answering questions about your own business forces a level of clarity that’s easy to skip when you’re the one holding the pen.
What came out of that session shaped everything. Peppermint Pup was playful and specific — built for people who treat their dogs like family and want the accessories to match. The brand needed to hold that feeling whether it was on a product tag, a banner behind a market table, or in someone’s email inbox. That meant building a full system, not just a logo. Color, type, packaging, web, social, and email all needed to speak the same language from day one, because patchwork brands don’t survive the market table test. Customers can tell when it was designed in pieces.
A Year of Proof
Peppermint Pup ran for about a year — markets, booths, online sales, and a social presence that actually looked like something. The brand held across every surface it touched: packaging, web, email, and print. What ended the run wasn’t the brand. It was a full-time agency job that eventually crowded out the bandwidth. Stepping back from a side business because your main work got too demanding is its own kind of success, even if it doesn’t feel like it at the time. The brand did what it was supposed to do. It made the business visible.
The Work
What Running Your Own Process Teaches You
Being your own client is the hardest design project you’ll take on. Every instinct that serves you well in client work — the ability to step back, question the obvious, push past what looks good to what actually works — gets loud and opinionated when the business is yours. The Brand Ignition Blueprint forced me to answer the same questions I ask my clients, honestly, about my own work.
What came back was a brand I could stand behind and a process I trusted even more for having lived it from the inside.
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READY TO BUILD A BRAND THAT DOES THE REAL WORK?
I take on a limited number of projects at a time so every client gets my full attention. If you're ready to stop blending in, let's talk.