The Lowdown on Chez Christophe’s Sweet New Chocolate Bar Branding

Branding Vancouver looks at some of the more interesting logos and icons that appear in Vancouver’s food and beverage scene. Some of the explanations will be long and others short, but the goal of deeper understanding will be constant. If you want the backstory of a particularly compelling local brand revealed, let us know via @scoutmagazine and we’ll try to figure it out.

The Brand: Chez Christophe. | The Designer: Arithmetic Creative

For this edition of Branding Vancouver, we spoke with multiple award-winning Chocolatier, Christophe Bonzon of Burnaby’s Chez Christophe chocolate shop/cafe, on the heels of a striking rebrand and first time collab with local design studio, Arithmetic. In his own words…

“Last year, while we were in the process of adding new products to our collection – which needed packaging, of course – we took a look back… So far, we had done all of our packaging on our own. We felt that with our fifth anniversary coming in 2018 it would be good timing to create a cohesive line of packaging and to make our brand stronger. We looked at different design companies in Vancouver and had a really good connection with Arithmetic. We loved their previous projects and felt it was a good match.

“Branding has a huge impact on the consumer and we wanted our wrappers to reflect the high quality ingredients we use for our chocolate bars. We wanted it to be classy, elegant and modern.Our love of clean lines and modern sophistication were sources of inspiration for the new look. My wife Jess and I both love the Art Deco era and felt it would put a little bit of “us” into our packaging. As well, we wanted to include the mountain to represent Switzerland in a subtle way: the play of lines and triangles mimic the Swiss Alps.

“For our fifth anniversary we created two custom dark chocolates – Montreux 63.3% and Yverdon 70.4% – which we named the after two cities in Switzerland that are close to my heart. Yverdon is where I was born and grew up. Montreux is where I learned my trade. Both are beautiful lakeside towns that are also close to the mountains.”

Take a look…