Pathfinder
Overview
Built for the outdoors and designed to go the distance, Pathfinder is a New Zealand food brand with a clear mission: energy-rich provisions that pack down small and perform hard. We developed the brand from the ground up, creating a positioning, identity and packaging suite that looks as good on a shelf as it does in a pack.
Brand
Pathfinder was founded by a former British serviceman with a passion for the outdoors and a frustration with the food options available to hunters, trampers and adventurers in New Zealand. The brief was clear: create a brand that felt authentic to that world without leaning on tired outdoor clichés.
The positioning we landed on "Carve your own path" - captures the spirit of the brand without spelling it out. Independent, self-sufficient, and quietly confident. The kind of person who doesn't need a trail to follow.
The visual identity draws from MRE (Meals Ready to Eat) design language: utility typography, topographic map textures, and a colour palette of deep olive and burnt orange that feels both functional and distinctive. The result is a brand that looks like it means business, without taking itself too seriously.
With the brand foundation in place, we rolled the identity across a range of products - coffee, tawny port, bier sticks and scroggin trail mix. Each product carries the same visual system while still feeling considered as an individual item. The kraft stock on the scroggin pouch, the wine label architecture on the port bottle, the structured stand-up pouches for the coffee and bier sticks - every format was treated as its own design problem.
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