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When The Brief Is To Make A Portable Toilet Look Cool Youd Better Not Bottle It
The branding strategy for Luii, a portable toilet startup, emphasizes the importance of understanding a product's true identity rather than conforming to category norms. By creating a vibrant visual and verbal identity that positions the product as a lifestyle choice rather than a medical device, Lark Design successfully redefined the brand's perception and appeal, showcasing the power of strategic design thinking in challenging categories.
Creative Boom: News Graphic Design When the brief is to make a portable toilet look cool, you'd better not bottle it When a portable toilet startup asks for a full brand identity, most agencies might flush the brief straight in the bin. Lark Design sat down and got to work. Written By: Tom May 16 March 2026 There's a particular kind of brief that separates the genuinely strategic designer from the merely decorative one. It's the brief where the product is brilliant, but the category is, let's say, challenging.
Where the first instinct might be to reach for soft blues, clinical sans-serifs and the kind of reassuring language you'd find on a box of incontinence pads. Where playing it safe feels not just tempting, but almost defensible. Lark Design Studio, a branding agency based in Leamington Spa, got exactly that brief when portable toilet startup Luii came knocking. And what they did with it is worth pulling apart, because the thinking is genuinely useful for any creative handed a project they aren't quite sure how to position. The trap hiding in the brief Luii makes a portable, pocket-sized toilet.
It's a genuinely clever piece of product design, developed with Tone, the team behind homeware brand Joseph Joseph, and aimed squarely at anyone who's ever been caught short on a long hike, a festival site, a long motorway stretch, or somewhere else where the facilities are, shall we say, lacking. That's not a niche market. That's essentially everyone. But here's where the trap lives: the moment you start designing for a product adjacent to continence, the gravitational pull of the healthcare aesthetic becomes almost irresistible. The blues. The reassuring copy.
The stock imagery of serene, relieved-looking people in sensible outdoor clothing. You know the look. It whispers "medical device" even when it's trying to say "lifestyle product." Luii's founders knew this, which is why they came to Lark asking for something more. Not just a logo. A full visual and verbal identity that would position them as a consumer brand. Because, as the press release puts it with admirable directness: everybody pees, after all.
Shape-shifting The smartest decision Lark made (and it's a decision that looks obvious in retrospect, which is the hallmark of good design thinking) was to root the entire identity in the product itself. Specifically, in the elliptical aperture that makes Luii's shape so distinctive. That ellipse becomes the anchor for everything: icons, illustrations, patterns. It runs through the identity so consistently that even without the wordmark, you're seeing Luii.
It's the kind of systematic thinking that elevates a brand from a nice logo to an actual visual language; one that scales, that's ownable, and that constantly reinforces the thing that makes the product special. It also does something quietly clever: it makes the identity about design, not function. You're not being reminded what the product is for. You're being reminded how beautifully it's been made. That's a significant repositioning, achieved entirely through formal visual decisions. Flushing out the colour brief Colour was the other major battleground.
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The article discusses a unique branding strategy for a product in a typically unglamorous category, providing insights that can inspire brand strategy professionals to rethink conventional approaches.