Rebranding Girls Be Strong, and going to Uganda

I led the rebranding of Girls Be Strong and then went to Uganda, where I taught art to small children at the Hope Hill learning centre and visited a vocational school for single mothers to hand over techniques from Korea and the pattern for Kikobana’s bag.

The rebrand and the trip are one project, not two, and the order matters: I did the identity work first and then had to stand behind it in a room where nobody cared what a logo looked like. That is a useful thing to happen to a designer early.

Teaching art to the children at Hope Hill

Art lessons are the part of this I was most confident about and most wrong about. I had a plan. The plan lasted about four minutes. What actually worked was handing over the materials and getting out of the way — the children did not need a curriculum, they needed enough paper and somebody to be interested in what appeared on it.

I have taught nothing since that felt as useful, and I have never watched anyone concentrate that hard.

The vocational school, and the pattern

The second half was the part I had built the brand for. At a vocational school for single mothers, I passed on techniques from Korea and handed over the pattern for the Kikobana bag — the actual production pattern, not a sample.

That is the difference I care about. A donated bag is one bag. A pattern is a skill that stays in the building, that can be taught to the next intake, and that puts the person who sews it in a position to be paid for it. It is also, frankly, the thing that makes Kikobana’s five per cent more than a transfer of money: what travels is the ability to make the product.

What the rebrand had to carry

Girls Be Strong’s line is let girls be girls, not brides. An identity around that sentence has exactly two ways to fail: it can be so soft that it looks like a greetings card, or so heavy that nobody wants to wear it. What I aimed for was something a fifteen-year-old would put on a bag without explaining it — because the sentence is doing the arguing and the design only has to survive being carried around.

I came home with the percentage on my products no longer feeling like a marketing decision.