Teen furniture brand gets Multistorey/Thyme look

Multistorey and Thyme Design Associates have collaborated to create an identity, catalogue and website for Playroom, a mail order furniture and bed-linen company that targets teenagers and launches later this month.

The brainchild of three ex-Habitat employees, Sarah Dashfield, Malcolm Brighton and Malcolm Curzon, the company plans to offer modern furnishings to a neglected market sector, according to creative director Dashfield.

‘In the UK retail market nobody targets teenage kids specifically,’ says Dashfield.

‘The competition tends to be traditional or low priced and not particularly stylish. We want to encourage teenagers to design their own space.’

Although the company will initially focus on mail order and the Web, with three annual catalogues and an e-commerce capable website planned, a move into retail would be a ‘natural progression’, Dashfield adds.

The first catalogue (pictured), by South Wales-based Thyme Design Associates, launches in early April. TDA partner Geoff Smith says the challenge is to deliver credibility to parents without alienating the teen audience.

‘It’s visually structured to teens and uses very now illustrations, but stresses the credibility of the product range to the parents,’ Smith explains.

The company’s identity had to avoid being ‘too childish’ and uses ‘the triangle arrow normally associated with Play buttons to suggest playing computer games, musical instruments and CDs’, according to Multistorey partner Harry Woodrow.

‘We steered clear of typefaces currently associated with the youth market as this would date the company quite quickly,’ he adds.

The group has worked with the company for two years creating bed linen designs and was appointed to the identity work on the back of this.