Private Label

Turn a van full of somebody else's products into a brand Hi-Line owns.

The challenge

Reselling another company's products means reselling another company's margin, and it means every can going out on the van carries a name that is not yours. A private label was the answer, which sounds simple until you try it. MAXX had to hold spray paint, glass cleaner, brake cleaner, and whatever came next inside one system, while each product stayed instantly identifiable. It had to survive fourteen colorways of spray paint without being redrawn every time. It had to sit on a customer's shelf beside the national brands and not look like a knockoff. And it had to read from across a shop, in bad light, off a moving van.

My contribution

I named it, built the identity, and designed every package in the line. The system is a fixed architecture: the Hi-Line mark and the store line at the top, the MAXX wordmark as the anchor, the product name in its own colour family, then the benefit icons and the regulatory copy in a consistent band below. Green for brake cleaner, cyan for glass, the full spectrum for paint. Each product reads as its own thing and as part of one line. I made the sell sheets that travel with them, and I art directed the photography so the products get shown where they actually get used. A shop floor next to a rotor and a caliper. The hood of a truck at a stop at sunset. A workbench in an industrial bay.

The point of view

A private label only works if nobody has to forgive it. The moment it looks cheaper than the brand sitting beside it, the whole argument for owning the line collapses. The discipline is in the system. Decide once how it behaves, then let every new product drop into place.