Move over Pampers: Freestyle, with an identity by Marina Veziko, is here to shake up the diaper game

Freestyle speaks to a different generation of parents. With its high-quality, eco-friendly range of baby care products, the brand wants to appeal to new parents, especially Gen Z, who prioritise ideas of community and sustainability. But a sustainable brand needn’t mean a visually boring one; this is something that Helsinki-based designer and creative director Marina Veziko understood. When Freestyle reached out to her to craft the identity, she instinctively gravitated towards a bright and bold visual language that would inject a bit of fun into one of the first, yet mundane tasks that new parents learn – changing diapers.

Along with the energetic colour palette, the wordmark is probably what you’ll first notice about the brand. Designed with a “bulge in the centre,” the wordmark seems like you might be viewing it through a fisheye lens. “The rounded design language of the logo represents the Earth, and pays homage to ’80s and ’90s graphics, wooing especially millennial parents,” says Veziko. And this nod to Earth was important – in its promise to be a better, more sustainable brand, Freestyle utilises a 100% tree-free bamboo core sourced from an FSC Certified Organic farm.

Unlike the industry standard wood pulp, which contributes to deforestation, bamboo regrows in as little as six months, making it a more environmentally responsible choice. And it elevates the product too; with its hyper-absorbent BambooTek™ technology, Freestyle diapers are 55% more absorbent than other plant-based players in the market.

This earth-forward sensibility of the brand, then, was best captured with the subtle bulge in the custom-designed wordmark, while the rest of the brand typography was set in FK Grotesk Neue and FK Roman Standard by Florian Karsten. “While the instinct might be to choose something cute and childlike for a baby brand, I’ve opted for typefaces that are simple and timeless to balance out the colourful packaging and vibrant photography,” Veziko tells us. “In the very beginning, we actually experimented with a super minimal and typographic approach, very Swiss design-y (black and white, huge text set in Helvetica), but ultimately found that incorporating more vibrant visuals was essential for connecting with a wider audience in this particular product category.”

The vibrancy does wonders for the brand. Its rich colours – best seen in the stack of the diaper packages – gives the brand a standout look, allowing it to grab attention even from a distance in the aisle of a department store. The way Veziko plays with the colours is also interesting; in the pack of baby wipes, for example, the edges of the purple package is winged with bright red, while the flip top lid is coloured in a bright green, amping up the contrast. The family of graphic shapes adds to the energy of the identity as well – oval and lozenge shapes hold key information like sizing, while outlines of starbursts and flowers hold photos of smiling babies (all, presumably very happy with their diapers).

Marina Veziko

Freestyle