Yankee Candle
Modernising an icon for a new era of Fragrance

Services
Strategy, Branding, Tone of Voice, Creative Direction, Art Direction, Retail Design, Experience Design.

The Challenge

Home fragrance is booming. But Yankee Candle (the global leader in premium fragrance) was fast becoming another forgettable fragrance brand. Their once iconic jar has been copied, and they were lacking in relevance to modern consumers. With a rapid turnaround required, Yankee Candle utilised our Brand Renovation program to reclaim market position. Focusing on revitalising a legacy brand's core identity, rebuilding meaning, distinctiveness and creative power to ensure that Yankee Candle® becomes totally un-ignorable. We created a new brand platform, iconic graphic asset, design system, toolkit and more. All deployed at record speed by local marketing teams across EMEA and APAC markets.

Our Strategy

We created a new brand platform built on our insight that target consumer segments use fragrance to conjure specific moments. ‘A Fragrance for Every Moment’, connected deeply with Yankee Candles' knowledge that great fragrance has a unique power to bridge the gap between moments and memories. Shifting the brand from simply selling scents to being relevant to consumer lives and positioning Yankee Candle fragrances as the trigger to these high-value moments. We created a deep emotional connection between the brand and the emotional states people are looking to conjure.

Creative solution

Distinctive macro photography sets the brand apart by capturing the sensory experience the fragrance brings to a moment. Alongside this, we established the new jar silhouette as a distinctive and versatile graphic asset designed for global brand memorability.

These hero elements defined a new, consistent design system. Built for flexibility, a checkerboard motif showcases the breadth of the fragrance portfolio across the consumer journey, from digital platforms to the retail floor. This system ensures the brand truly connects with people while remaining highly functional. Powered by a comprehensive visual and tone of voice toolkit, the renovation is now being deployed across EMEA and APAC. This toolkit is powering local marketing teams to deliver consistently across diverse international markets, proving that even a legacy icon can be revitalised to achieve total relevance in a new era of fragrance.