The power of now doesn’t have to be new.
Proving that old can be ever relevant, a vintage clothing retailer curates quality across movements and materialities
Project Services
- Strategy
- Branding
- Art Direction
Narro
- Just Otherness
Selling vintage apparel takes a special kind of ambidexterity. It’s as much about articulating a harmoniously anachronistic curatorial vision as, practically, dealing with what can be sourced on the ground. Branding for such an enterprise must fulfill present-day fashion desires while leaving room to storytell the pasts embedded in the pieces themselves.
When Narro founder Caitlin McNulty came to Otherness, she was forthright: contemporary designer collections and current trends are her inspiration. The items she selects may be from long before she was born, but her clients – sophisticated Gen Zers and their cool older siblings – seek them out expressly because they have relevance today.
Narro needed a rollout-ready brand system to highlight its positioning, setting it apart from competitors. Whether conducted via its online store or its Brooklyn brick and mortar, the business is defined by a highly edited collection that doesn’t shout “vintage;” it whispers. Through this tastemaker’s approach, once-upon-a-time relics become modern wardrobe staples and sustainable statement pieces that shake up the status quo.
Typography that time-travels
Because each product Narro sells is chosen for being the sublime expression of a given style or silhouette, the brand required a logo that communicated authority. We selected the bold, all-caps confidence of a grotesque typeface, signaling classic fashion restraint and refinement.
For contrast, the logo pairs with a Sentinel typeface in text-driven assets. The slab serif introduces a boxy bookish quality that comes across as historical and lived-in. The fonts’ juxtaposition captures the high-low interplay of the urban Americana that created Narro, unapologetically nodding to pop culture moments while also drawing from canonical art and design.
Dialogues at every touchpoint
Narro is Latin for “I tell,” and the brand understands dressing as a way to express personal identity – as a self-narration always in dialogue with its surrounding materials.
All the physical touchpoints Otherness designed – from hangtags, packaging stickers, and shopping bags to business cards, promo cards, window signage, and wheatpaste posters – hold this dialogic space. Clean and chic yet with a clear point of view, these assets let Narro’s clothes speak for themselves. Then a conversation ensues, connecting their wearers equally to times from before as to a sense of timelessness.
