Wedge designs Stone&Skillet’s identity around the pan it’s named after

The Brand Identity: The skillet was hiding in plain sight. For more than a decade, it lived only in the name Stone&Skillet, the New England English muffin company founded in 2013 by two people griddling dough on a cast-iron pan in a Boston apartment. The pan that gave the brand half its name had never made it onto the packaging. But when Montreal-based brand and design studio Wedge was brought in to evolve the identity, the first move was to make that absent object the brand’s defining mark. Stone&Skillet has grown from a single product sold at farmers’ markets into a range stocked across more than 3,000 stores.

The visuals, however, had not kept pace with the product. On shelf, the brand felt inconsistent and quieter than it needed to be, so Wedge’s task was to sharpen Stone&Skillet into something distinctive and ownable, build shelf presence in a crowded category and leave room for the range to grow. “The skillet was actually not an identifiable asset in the old identity at all. It only appeared in the brand name, so our goal was to amplify and celebrate that as a core visual within the brand going forward,” explains Sarah Schiesser, Design Lead at Wedge.

The studio pared the pan back to its simplest form, a clean silhouette with a handle that doubles as a container for everything else on pack. The logo, the product name and the variant all sit framed inside it. “The strength of the skillet is that it represents not only the brand name, but also the product’s baking process,” Schiesser tells us. “It references the vessel in which the English muffins are made and the way many people ultimately enjoy them.” For Stefan Kohli, Creative Director at Stone&Skillet, the redrawn pan reset the foundations.

“The skillet is obviously deeper than just a graphic element for us – it’s our name, our process, and the foundation of our brand,” he details. “Wedge reinterpreted the symbol in a way that became a new baseline for our whole ecosystem.” The brief that produced it was built around maturation. Stone&Skillet arrived with a loyal customer base and a clear point of view, and Kohli was protective of both. “There’s a sense of warmth, craftsmanship and heritage in the brand that was important for us to bring from past to present,” he explains.

The studio worked from a comprehensive audit of references, strategy and context the brand supplied, then went looking for what was already worth keeping. “They approached the project incredibly thoughtfully – working with us hands-on to identify the strongest ingredients while building a more cohesive and robust system around them,” Kohli reveals. Colour is where Wedge made its boldest play against the category. English muffins tend to sit in warm neutrals and soft bakery cues, but Stone&Skillet had already edged away from that with brighter packaging.

The redesign pushes further into deep purples, blues and greens chosen for depth and contrast, held in check by cream and black typography and a signature ampersand picked out in butter yellow. The richer tones give each variant its own identity on shelf while the system stays unmistakable. Underpinning all of it is Baton Nouveau, a sans serif typeface with thick, rounded strokes and a confident tone. “We selected the typeface for its strong forms and hard-working legibility at small sizes,” Schiesser explains.

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The article discusses a significant rebranding effort for a specific company, which is impactful for the brand design industry, while the approach taken is somewhat novel but not groundbreaking, and it offers relevant insights for brand strategy professionals.