Ireland’s Eye
Photographer: Louise Samuelsen
Stylist: Paula Hughes
The mission
IrelandsEye is a luxury knitwear brand with deep Dublin city roots. They’re a family-run business that unites traditional craftsmanship and contemporary style. All of their pieces are actually made in Ireland and finished by hand. It’s a manufacturing process that doesn’t come cheap, so their positioning and branding needed to place them squarely at the higher end of the consumer fashion market. They needed to widen their appeal to a larger, more diverse, and sophisticated audience.
The question
What does a modern, urban version of Irish heritage craft look like?
The team at IrelandsEye came to Neworld in search of a new brand identity that would represent them as they really are: grounded in their Irish heritage, devoted to their craft, and uncompromisingly fashion-forward.
This new identity needed to encompass their deep sense of place: in Dublin, by the sea and their urban edge: living and working in the city. It needed to celebrate their heritage as a multi-generational family business and their commitment to craft and quality, while keeping the design aesthetic contemporary.
There were a lot of strands to knit together (that’s our one textile pun) but we were up for it.
The process
The most compelling branding often comes from a place of tension, when you take two apparently conflicting ideas and find a way to express them in one visual identity.
That was very much what we were dealing with when we began work on this project. “Woollen jumpers, handcrafted in Ireland by a small family business” vs. “Cosmopolitan fashion brand designed for modern city living.”
The transformation
We began by building a visual language for the brand, made up of colour, fonts, typography, icons, images, patterns, textures, illustrations, finishes, visual devices. We chose earthy colours and organic shapes, but took a more minimalist, abstract approach to texture.
We also selected an incredible art director to manage an editorial photoshoot for their seasonal collections, two years in a row. The models, the styling, the location scouting and the natural, unposed shots spoke volumes about the brand’s design-first approach. You could see at a glance who this clothing was for, and exactly how they’d wear it. Knitwear has rarely looked so effortlessly cool.
