Brand Experience for Divan

How questioning a simple brief revealed a much larger opportunity to bring coherence to a heritage brand.

Designer / Consultant

In the early 2000s, we were approached to design a New Year gift box for Divan, one of Turkey's most established confectionery and hospitality brands. After visiting stores, reviewing the existing packaging and speaking with the management team, we reached an unexpected conclusion: the brand did not need another box.

At the time, Divan's visual and product language was fragmented across stores, packaging and chocolates. Adding one more design to an already crowded system would only increase the noise. We therefore declined the initial project.

The real design problem was not the absence of another package. It was the absence of a coherent system. Looking back, I still strongly believe in that decision. When there is already too much visual and strategic noise, sometimes the best design strategy is not to design another object.

This was not a conventional response to a commercial brief, and a few months later senior management invited us back to explain our thinking in greater detail. That conversation became the beginning of a much broader collaboration.

Our role gradually shifted from designing an individual package to advising Divan on how design could create coherence across the wider brand experience. Together, we defined a programme lasting roughly eighteen months that addressed the brand as an integrated system across identity, products, packaging, retail display and architecture. We began with the brand itself. Divan's existing wreath symbol had become visually heavy and had lost some of its original symmetry over time. Rather than replacing it, we refined it into a more geometric and contemporary form. Small but meaningful adjustments were also made to the logotype.

The intention was not to reinvent a heritage brand, but to understand what was essential, preserve it and make it relevant again.

The next step was the product itself: the chocolates. We worked closely with Divan's Belgian chocolate master to establish a coherent product architecture. What proportion of a box should be milk, dark or white chocolate? How many pieces should carry recognisable Divan signatures such as the wreath or the letter D? What should their dimensions and forms be? Which pieces should be handmade and which machine-produced?

Once these principles were established, packaging became much more rational. Products with controlled dimensions and weights could be organised into a coherent family of boxes rather than being fitted into individually designed packages. From there, the same logic extended to shelves, sales points and eventually the stores.

What had started as a request for one seasonal package became a system capable of guiding product, packaging, retail and spatial decisions. A clearer product architecture reduced unnecessary variation and made future decisions easier across different disciplines.

The project became an exercise in translating one vision across graphic design, food design, packaging and architecture. Each discipline was answering the same underlying question: what should luxury hospitality and taste feel like for Divan?

The objective was not simply visual consistency. It was to make the values of the brand recognisable across every customer touchpoint. The outcome went far beyond a redesign. Individual products, packages and spaces could now contribute to a recognisable whole without losing their own character.

A couple of years later, the brand was redesigned again as part of a wider corporate identity programme initiated by its parent company and developed with a major American design agency led by a renowned graphic designer. That later approach was more radical and created a distinctly new contemporary identity.

The contrast still interests me.

What should a designer preserve, and what should be changed? For me, Divan remains a reminder that one of design's most important responsibilities is not simply creating the new, but deciding what deserves continuity and what genuinely needs transformation.