Why this new ice-cream brand only makes sense after dark

There's a particular kind of brief that arrives fully loaded. Not in the sense of being demanding or complicated, but in the sense that the insight is so clean, so surprising, the work practically tells you what it needs to be. Snooz sounds like it was one of those.

The key fact is this: more than 60% of ice cream is eaten after 6pm. Which means we're all sitting on our sofas, spooning up sugar, emulsifiers and a small parade of e-numbers... then wondering why we can't get off to sleep. Snooz's founders spotted the contradiction and built around it, replacing the usual suspects with camomile, theanine, magnesium and lemon balm. Ice cream that, as How&How puts it, "tucks you in and turns off the lights."

It's a genuinely clever product idea. But a clever product idea and a coherent brand are two very different things, and this is where the How&How team earned their keep.

The tyranny of the jingle

Before you can design against a category, you have to be honest about what that category actually looks like. And ice cream, with a few notable exceptions, tends to lean into daytime imagery.

This is where the brief becomes interesting for any creative professional to examine. The temptation, when you have a product with a clear point of difference, is to nod at the category conventions and then differentiate within them. Keep the approachability, soften the colour palette, and add a moon motif somewhere. Safe. Legible. Forgettable.

How&How went the other way entirely. The decision was to create a brand that belongs to the night, not as a metaphor, but as a genuine design philosophy. Every choice was made against the category's daytime instincts.

Designing for after dark

The wordmark came first. The team worked to develop a logo with a texture you'd want to press your face into. Soft, almost cloud-like letterforms, finessed with two eclipsed moons built directly into the type. "A wordmark that says sleep and space all in one," as they describe it. Not a sun. Not a cone. Two moons.

From there, the visual world expanded outward. Animations with a screensaver quality: zero gravity, starry skies, the kind of thing you'd stare at while drifting off. A deep, cool colour palette that sits at the opposite end of the spectrum from the neons and primaries that dominate the freezer aisle.

Photographer Charlie McKay's shoot is worth examining on its own terms. Rather than the oversaturated, golden-hour product photography that dominates food branding, the approach was overexposed and flash-on: the visual grammar of a late night, shot the way you might photograph something at a house party. It's an unusual reference point for ice cream, but to my mind, exactly the right one.

Head of copy Will Nicklin's work on tone of voice followed the same logic. "Not a cherry, but an NSFK [not suitable for kids], spoon-in-cheek voice more comfortable snuggled on the sofa than shared over the dinner table," as How&How describes it.

Personally, I'd describe it as: adult, dry, a little conspiratorial. Ice cream brands rarely speak to grown-ups as grown-ups, and there's a reason for that: most brands are still chasing the child at the table. Snooz, though, is talking to the person who sent the kids to bed.

Key takeaways

What makes Snooz worth covering on Creative Boom isn't that it looks beautiful (though it does), but that it demonstrates something important about how great creative work is made. The insight drove the strategy, the strategy drove the creative territory, and the creative territory was executed with enough commitment that there's no visible hedging anywhere in the system. Nobody flinched and added a yellow.

That kind of coherence is rarer than it should be. It requires clients who trust the process and agencies who resist the urge to soften their own thinking. "We've helped Snooz launch a brand in all its knickerbocker glory," says How&How's press release. It's a good line, but most importantly, it's earned.

For designers looking at their own category-defining briefs, the Snooz project is a useful reminder: if the insight is strong enough, the bravest thing you can do is follow it all the way to the end.