Made True: Heirloom Thread
Brand Identity
Art Direction
Lettering
Year
2025
Role
Brand Designer
Team
Concept Design Chloé Osei-Yaw
Men's Design Austin Marshalek
Women's Design Grace-Marie Cooney
Accessories Design Sarah Durkin
Production Dalissa Rosario
Merchandising Tullia Senatore, Caleb Domael, Sarah Concannon, Mia Silverman
Campaign Direction & Photography Allison Freidly
Social & Content Lana Tamborella
Website Design, Copywriting Shannon Maier
MadeTrue is a brand identity and campaign system built for Madewell's 20th anniversary, reimagining the brand's 1937 workwear roots through a neo-heritage lens.
As the sole brand designer on the project, I developed the hand-lettered logo and rope-motif identity, a color and type system drawn from archival garment tags, and a cross-channel application system spanning hangtags, hardware, OOH, and social.
The project also included campaign direction support, lookbook photography, and a website concept that brought the identity to Madewell.com.
The Brief
Madewell started in 1937 as a workwear manufacturer in New Bedford, Massachusetts, decades before it became J.Crew's denim-driven sister brand. For its 20th anniversary as a retail store, our team proposed Heirloom Thread: a collection that goes back to that origin and reconstructs it for the city. Grounded in our workwear beginnings and
inspired by those who walk with both grit and grace. This is our history, reimagined for city life. Made well, Made True.
The challenge for Brand Creative was building an identity system that could hold both eras at once, without becoming costume, and without losing the toughness of the original.
The Collection
Heirloom Thread translates workwear archetypes such as canvas vests, denim dungarees, utility outerwear, into pieces built for layering, movement, and everyday wear. The identity was designed around this product: rugged materials, structured silhouettes, and hardware that needed a visual language strong enough to match.
The Identity
The primary mark is a hand-lettered badge built from two references: script lettering drawn from Madewell's original 1937 logo, and a rope border pulled from dock workwear. Color and type were sourced directly from archival garment tags and concept design mood board. The system carries through to every product touchpoint: hangtags, woven labels, leather patches, and hardware.
Campaign Direction & Application
The campaign was shot at South Street Seaport, a working harbor in the middle of New York City and the clearest real-world match for the brief. It's the marriage of the brand's dock-workwear origin and its current home, in one location. The identity is completed by the imagery of tall ships and cobblestone against the skyline. The same system extended into 360 GTM marketing and digital: wild posting, social, campaign, and a Madewell.com landing page concept built around the campaign's typographic marquee and badge placement.
Presentation Deck Design & Lookbook
The identity system was also built to carry the pitch itself, the deck that presented this collection internally. The same type hierarchy, color logic, and badge marks used across the product apply just as well to a trend slide, a sales table, or a section divider. Good systems hold up under unglamorous content. This is that system at work on strategy, data, and merchandising, beyond the product it's selling.
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