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Since I had very limited resources at the start of the business I had to do everything myself and this included all the design work and branding stuff. This is far from my strong points so in early 2007 I managed to get a bit of money from the Welsh Language Board and the Welsh Assembly Government to redesign the logo and packaging from the ground up.

After some excitement of searching for a designer I found a small, bilingual (welsh and english) design company named Kutchibok. They were great to work with and the designs and packaging development they did for me was better than I could have hoped.

I love the Welsh language and was overjoyed when I was able to embrace it into my chocolates. With this the name changed from "the happy hippo" to "hipo hyfryd" and the chocolate packaging started to embrace both english and welsh.

logo redesign

After taking a huge amount of time coming up with the old name, the happy hippo, I was told that the name was trademarked and it would have to be changed. Personally I am not a big fan of people being able to own a combination of words and was very reluctant to change my chocolates name. But after an hour of pouring over my welsh dictionary I had came up with a few words that I liked, when combined with hippo, including heddwch (peace), hardd (beautiful) and hoenus (joyous). The one that stood out was hyfryd though, meaning lovely/pleasant/delightful and pronounced as huv-rud with an emphasis on the first three letters.

old logo		new logo

The following designs are the other logos that the designers gave me but for various reasons were not choosen. I loved the crazy pink hippo but when the designers gave me sample ideas for the packaging it didn't look as good as the choosen design.

packaging redesign

The original packaging was a simple pink satanized card box with a paper sleeve to explain what was in it. It was compostable and I liked it but it had one thing wrong that had to be corrected, they were imported from China. To reduce the amount of transport miles that the chocolate had attached to it I decided to have the box redesigned and produced locally using recycled card and vegetable inks.

The printers who make the boxes are a small company called Premier Press.

old packaging		new packaging