Milgrad

Agency: Depot branding agency
Creative director: Alexey Fadeev
Creative director: Anastasia Treryakova
Art director: Vera Zvereva
Art director: Stas Neretin
Designer: Vera Zvereva
Designer: Tatyana Mikolaevskaya
Designer: Anastasia Tsyrkina
Designer: Alexey Baiteev
Project manager: Anna Rozhnova
Strategic Director: Farhad Kuchkarov
CEO: Alexey Andreev
Executive Director: Ksenia Parkhomenko
Head of digital: Ivan Krapivin
Communications Manager: Daria Vedernikova
Location: Russia
Project Type: Produced
Client: Milgrad
Product Launch Location: Russia
Packaging Contents: Dairy products: Milk, kefir, sour cream, cottage cheese, custard desserts, butter, curd-cheese and brine-ripened cheese
Packaging Substrate / Materials: A big range of materials

Milk products hold more than 22% of Russian FMCG market but dairy branding has stuck in recent years. Competition is high and it’s hard to stand out on the shelf. Brand Milgrad by Bryansk Dairy Factory is known as the first trademark which brings happiness. The marketing team came up with the idea of how the product can pierce the consumer’s heart. We decided to create something really cute and kind.

The blue cat travels across the packaging of different dairy products. It stares with interest, plays with a string, spies and skips a beat with expectation. The illustration starts from one side of the packaging and continues on the other, so it’s possible to interact with it straight from the supermarket’s shelf layout. Although Brunhilda kitty was the main muse for our art director, Vera Zvereva, every cat lover can recognize the creature’s ways through the illustration story.

We started our work by redesigning the main products in the dairy category. It was highly important to stay in commonly expected color-coding: white for milk, green for kefir, and light brown for buttermilk. We came up with a minimalistic idea to fill the background with a solid white color and differentiate the foodstuffs by changing the font color. Milk as the main product remained pure white with the only blue. The cute ambassador appears on every product also in the same blue shade. We have tailored the style to the whole range of Milgrad dairy products. So you can find the blue cat on sour cream, cottage cheese, custard desserts, butter, curd-cheese and brine-ripened cheese.

We have developed a new successive logo for Milgrad but in a lighter and more modern way. M is for milk. M is for Milgrad as well. M looks like a kitty’s muzzle. Letter M and cats have known fixtures in branding, but we have succeeded in distinctiveness by their combination, color, and meaning.

The design gets along well enough in digital as well. The Milgrad brand has an account on Instagram. Newly designed products are on sale all over the whole of Russia since august 2020. The Milgrad cat became popular in Japanese twitter, international Behance, Russian TikTok and it even turned into a meme at 9gag.com and pikabu.ru just in several days after release.