The Creative Industries Austria collects successful and vivid examples that show how creative people create added value and turnover together with their customers from the business world - even under tough competitive conditions, as the example of a bakery in Graz proves. The combination of craftsmanship and design has an appetizing effect and has doubled turnover.
With body and soul
How does bread taste when you breathe a soul into it? The Graz entrepreneur Martin Auer set out in search of the real taste and found his recipe for success through cooperation with the design agency moodley. With a new assortment and fresh ideas, the company has reached new customers, a new team spirit and higher sales.
Demand for excellence and aesthetics
Selling bread in saturated markets is a major challenge for bakeries today: Industrially manufactured products are disappearing like hot rolls and discounters and petrol station shops are intensifying the competition with baking boxes. Against this background, Martin Auer took over his family's bakery business in 2011, where bread has been baked for 650 years.
The baker wanted to go his own way and was looking for external creative partners to implement and communicate the new vision. Martin Auer wanted professionals with the same standards of excellence and aesthetics to discuss the really relevant questions, make relevant answers visible and make the spirit of the company tangible. He found them in the Graz-based design agency moodley brand identity.
Path to a new identity
In the summer of 2012, the collaboration began with the repositioning of the brand and the further development of the business model. "In the initial phase, the benefit was to have someone who understands the company," says Auer, describing an added value of the cooperation that he does not take for granted but which is essential. Mike Fuisz, designer and founder of moodley brand identity, conceded buyer qualities to his client in return. The chemistry was obviously right from the start. At first, the two of them and their teams devoted themselves to the core of the new brand and actually questioned everything. A year later, all those involved agreed that people were longing for something that had been lost through industrial bread production, and this is exactly what the new claim of the traditional bakery promised: "Give bread back its soul!
© Martin Auer | moodley brand identity
"Let's rye!"
Since then, the Auer Bakery has been offering not only high-quality small and fine pastries but also exclusively vegan, lactose-free, egg-free organic bread based on handmade natural sourdough. However, qualitative growth also requires more resources for the employees, so that the spirit is shared by everyone and passed on to the customers - a process at least as complex as the meticulously thought-out and implemented design of web and print products, shops and cafés.
Today, the added value of the repositioning, which was awarded the renowned Marktkieker 2016 Innovation Prize, is visible and tangible everywhere: in the design of the bread kitchen, where bread and street food is available at the centrally located Jakominiplatz. In the mix of chalk board and environmentally friendly packaging, sympathy and closeness, plain language and the desire to play with language. "Lass uns roggen!" invites you to enjoy the new attitude towards life. "Let's get dressed up!" is the motto on the building grid when a new branch is being built, and the colourful small cars are cruising through the city with the message "Make bread not war! The signature, which Mike Fuisz and his team have decisively shaped, is recognizable even in tiny details. moodley has taken up ideas, consistently developed them further and poured them into a design concept. With the result that the aestheticization of the new brand is in line with the company's vision. "Whether it's the layout of a magazine or the design of a packaging design, the tone is right," the creative entrepreneur describes a significant benefit of the cooperation.
© Martin Auer | moodley brand identity
Magnetism of the brand
"Give bread back its soul." The slogan, which is sympathetically varied on smaller and larger screens, on packaging, blackboards and in the in-house magazine, can be understood as a passionate plea for the value of a basic foodstuff, as a playful invitation to enjoy life. Customers have obviously understood the sentence well, as the figures show. Between 2011 and 2018, sales rose by more than 90 percent. The creative energy of the cooperation has a lasting effect: the design of the next store is being tinkered with loaf and soul. For the first time on land.