Oliver Grace anchors Redheads in Swiss Modernism and a flexible grid

The Brand Identity: Founded in 1946, Redheads is one of those brands most Australians have simply always known – its matches, firelighters and BBQ fuel have been sold through major grocery stores for the better part of a century, anchored by Ms Redheads, a mascot whose hair, eyes and posture have shifted with each decade she has appeared in. Melbourne-based brand and user experience studio Oliver Grace was tasked with refreshing the identity for a contemporary audience and extending it across a new direct-to-consumer site, where nostalgia-led homewares and merchandise sit alongside the core range. The studio’s first move was archival.

Working through the evolution of Redheads’ wordmarks across the 20th century, they identified the late 1960s and early 1970s as the most useful reference point – a moment when Swiss Modernist thinking had filtered into mainstream packaging and Redheads’ own marks had moved away from the ornate scripts and traditional serifs of earlier decades. “The simple, grid-based nature of this approach also allowed us the greatest flexibility when designing for a whole family of different products with varied package sizes and ratios,” Creative Director Nick Lehrain tells us.

The reference is therefore both historical and practical: a period of the brand’s own past that happens to solve the problem in front of them. The resulting wordmark sits in Fusion Grotesk from Blaze Type, set bold and oversized across the front of every pack. Lehrain and his team trialled a wide range of neo-grotesque sans serifs in situ before settling on it. “It’s really well balanced but also has enough of the nice little quirks that were typical of early grotesques, including the tails on characters like the lowercase ‘l,’ ‘t,’ and ‘a,’ which help make the brand warm and approachable,” he explains.

The choice ties the typography to the same late-century moment as the wider system without leaning into predictable pastiche. Across the range, that wordmark is paired with Ms Redheads herself, now simplified but still unmistakable. The design focuses on her hair – long the most expressive element of her appearance – which has been reintroduced as a flowing graphic device that flickers across the lower half of the packaging like a flame. “We treat her like an asset to protect, not reinvent,” Brand Manager Virginie Van De Castelle reveals.

“The goal isn’t change for change’s sake, it’s making sure she still feels sharp and relevant on shelf and online, while staying immediately familiar to anyone who’s grown up with Redheads.” Internally, evolving her means reviewing the archive, comparing what is currently in market, and testing what reads best across different sizes and formats. The grid system holding it all together means product names, weights, quantities and the small render graphics indicating what is inside each pack all snap to a shared structure, which gives the range a consistent reading hierarchy.

Ms Redheads is the variable – her scale shifts to fit each pack’s proportions, working most comfortably on the narrow rectangles of match boxes and basic firelighters and requiring more careful adjustment on square or extremely narrow formats like the gas matches. The grid is also doing legal work. Because the products are flammable, Australian packaging laws require warning and disposal information on the back of even the smallest matchbox, and that does not scale gently. “It was situations like this that turned the grid into the hero of the layout,” Lehrain tells us.

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The article discusses a significant rebranding effort that modernizes a brand's identity while addressing practical considerations, making it relevant and impactful for brand strategy professionals.