Let's explore life!

Nicotoy, part of the Simba Dickie group, is one of Europe’s biggest manufacturers of pluche toys. They asked us to review their brand and packaging design. After a thorough positioning exercise we created a brand idea which fitted the product, the company’s ambition and the consumer needs.

Touching the Nicotoy pluche, you immediately feel the quality of the pluche: so soft you never want to stop cuddling. The old logo looked more like a toy-cars brand rather than a pluche toy brand and so it was important for us to bring softness to the logo. As Nicotoy is intended for the mass worldwide market, we also wanted to keep a ‘commercial’ feel to the logo instead of giving it a ‘designer craftmanship’ identity. We kept the plane icon, as it had been part of the brand since the beginning and therefore important for brand awareness in the BtoB market.

In line with this mass-market strategy the positioning aims at (grand)parents who want their kids ‘to be kids and have fun’, rather than to start with education and development stimuli at birth. Play and having fun with friends is what the Nicotoy brand is about. With innovative fabrics and super softness, Nicotoy has created a large family of cuddly toy friends, ready to take your baby on life’s adventure. Let’s explore life!

Next to the restyling of the identity we also redesigned the instore presentation of Nicotoy. Most important are the backing cards of the pluche toys. They usually hang in the shelves amongst a lot of competitors. We designed the backing card in such a way that the branding is optimized even in a full shelf space. A colour palette was created to bring out the best of each pluche design style. The packaging concept also includes various labels and (counter) displays.