Primary Carhartt Website

Carhartt Branding

I thought I’d throw a little design commenting out there. First, my personal connection. I wear a lot of Carhartt pants, they’re durable, comfortable, and I think they look decent enough. I’ve always known Carhartt as “Farmer and Construction Worker” work attire, or as they put it “the active worker”. And that is their target market, as evident by their primary website:

Carhartt Streetwear

But I have to say, I’m hugely impressed (no, not by the new women’s jeans), but by Carhartt’s split branding image. I stumbled on this second website the other day.

Wait, Carhartts are hip streetwear? When did that happen? Apparently in the nineties. Carhartt identified a seperate market, re-tooled their branding image for a new market and successfully split an offshoot brand. That doesn’t mean slap a new logo on a totally different product and pretend it’s unrelated to the parent brand, in the contrary. They took essentially the same product with the exact name and logo and reworked the image around it to connect with a different market: artistic, independent, but image conscious youth. That’s the power of good overall branding.

Well done Carhartt, well done.

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Listening to: Muse – Uprising