The moosox journey was full of hard work, learning, and adventure. As and when I have the time, I’ll share details of different elements of the journey to give others the chance to jumpstart their own endeavors. Hopefully, it's a fun read too.
As I mentioned in “our story”, we wanted an instantly recognizable logo because it was important that buyers thought about our mission every single time they wore our socks.
It needed to be simple, and it needed to work on the website, on our socks, and down the road, on who knows what – mootees anybody?
With our “cow” theme we brainstormed and searched the web for inspiration. You can scroll through the hundreds of ideas out there: “cow logo on google images”. When we finally came across it, we knew it was the one. Simple, powerful, cow inspired, and easily recognizable:
Originally designed for a steakhouse, we removed the crown and tested it out by sticky taping a printout to a plain pair of white socks. It looked great! Normally, when you buy a logo from a designer it is for a specific use and non-copyrightable, but when the designer learned of our mission, he was kind enough to give unrestricted rights to the modified version!
I thought we were done. I thought wrong. It turns out that putting a logo on a pair of socks is a non-trivial task. There are many techniques ranging from expensive, one-at-a-time heat transfer or printed logos to the more inexpensive and commonplace technique – the knitted logo. Because we wanted to make the socks as affordable as possible, we chose the latter, although it came with its own new complications, that we’d never thought about!
First, when you knit a logo you are limited to the resolution of the thread density, so we had to make a version of the logo using very low-resolution dots. It looked like this:
We thought we’d nailed it - until we had our manufacturer's rep, put on a sample pair and take pics and then we learned our second lesson. It looked awful. Turns out that sticky-taping a piece of paper to a pair of socks is a dumb way of testing the logo.
We hadn’t taken into account that (a) when you put on a pair of socks, the material stretches, and what looked good on paper, looks huge in practice and (b) the stretching increases as you move up the leg, so the proportions look horrible.
Back to the drawing board to create a smaller design that we stretched vertically to allow for the distortion when worn...this time, it worked!
As you can see from the image below (yes, my legs), even when stretched, the logo feels proportionally correct.
So, that's the story of our logo!
