Giving the best food you can feed your dog an equally fetching look
There are a lot of dog food brands out there, both traditional players and snazzy upstarts, but the fact is, most of them are just different flavors of the same two categories: kibble and fresh or frozen raw. The first is cheap and lacks nutrition, the second is expensive, messy, and inconvenient. After almost a decade working in the industry, Michael Goldman knew there had to be a better way.
So, he launched Tally's Ranch, named after his adopted dog and the ingredients, sourced from American farms and ranches. It's an entirely new format: freeze-dried food, which is shelf-stable and easy to serve, but miles and miles more nutritious than kibble (or even raw).
Michael engaged Saunter pre-launch to take a disparate set of elements and turn it into a cohesive brand story and identity, and create a website that reflected the impactful innovation and the spirit of the brand.
- Brand strategy & identity
- Web design
- Copywriting
- Art direction
- Performance marketing
- Social content
- Email design
Dog food is a very competitive market. We needed to make sure the Tally's Ranch identity was grounded in a firm understanding of why, not just what. We drew influence from agricultural Americana and the Mountain West. The typography uses a mix of styles of Hanley Pro by District 62, which feels hand-drawn and down-to-earth, as well as iA Writer Quattro, a mostly-monospaced font with proportionally wider glyphs for characters like M or W. This gives it the utilitarian attitude we sought, with more humanistic legibility. We designed a color palette that captured a warm, agrarian feeling — like harvest on the farm. The brand primarily leverages the green, tan, and brown, so for those hues, we added shades to give the digital system more versatility.
To match the homemade feel of the brand, and the real ingredients in the recipes, we commissioned a set of detailed watercolor illustrations. The idea was to feel almost like a farmer's market stall, with the images fading over time.
