Re-inventing toaster pastries to launch a healthy snack with a dose of childhood hunger pangs.
Creating a brand journey that inspires childlike joy was central to the brief Flings gave to the Blurr Bureau studio.
Flings is the brainchild of two food entrepreneurs – Dino Vassiliou and Benjamin Outmezguine, who took the much-loved toaster pastry snack and transformed it into a healthier, more natural adult treat.
The sweet snacks come in three flavours and are keto-friendly, gluten-free, and contain zero artificial colours.
But the whole vibe of the product goes against the wellness train, evoking the comfort foods many of us enjoyed as kids – when we didn’t know (or didn’t care) that the sugar high and carb load would be followed by a crash.
Enter Blurr Bureau, the New York and Melbourne-based brand-building agency, answering the Flings’ brief to create nostalgia and ignite childlike joy through the branding, tone of voice and packaging of an old-time favourite snack that reminds people of their youth.
The visual and verbal brand story Blurr created acknowledges both the nutritional and emotional needs of adult snackers. The brand touch points transport people to a time before the internet when life was less digitised, food won on flavour and oozed playful energy.
Blurr Bureau founder Jessica Dimcevski says: “From a design lens, the team wanted to encapsulate key emotions: nostalgia, childlike positivity, and fun. There are not a lot of food items that define the baby-boomer generation, like the classic toaster pastry. They were convenient and relatively cheap; every child knew of them, loved them, and grew up eating them.
“The challenge was to ensure the brand language balanced lightness and cheekiness with designs that also appealed to the health-conscious.”
The brief was multi-layered. On one level, Flings’ brand identity and all its supporting assets are needed to capture the feeling of childhood and the thrill of after-school treats. On another level – based on extensive consumer research – the team discovered that adults are constantly looking for the life-hack of sugary snacks. Consumers are serial snackers who constantly search for that snack that satisfies their tastebuds and represses the guilt.
Jessica Dimcevski adds: “Through our research, which spanned over two years and across both the US and Canada, we discovered that as these children got older – and as the world became more health-conscious – this acquired taste grew with them, and the market was expanding to include older consumers who were looking for not only convenience and familiarity but also some health benefits.
“What we discovered was that adults were craving a time when brands were more authentic, more analogue. Visually, the brand language we created looks like Flings travelled back in the ’80s and back to the present dressed in velvet and maybe a pair of bright, happy pants. Utilising a retro-futuristic direction across all touchpoints – we married nostalgic textures and patterns with more modern, clever language.”
It took Blurr and Flings over two years to put the product on the shelves and within the first month of its launch the brand exceeded its sales target by 100%.
