Truffl Creates the “Saint Laurent of Cookies”

Introduction

The Process

Truffl met with Last Crumb’s founding baker and were so blown away by the quality of the cookies, developed over 10 years of testing and development and baked over a proprietary 3-day process, that Truffl’s CEO invested in and became a co-founder of the company, spending the next year building a holistic brand identity, web platform, packaging experience, and business model.

More than just another cookie company, Truffl positioned Last Crumb as a luxury status symbol and elevated their cookies to be treated like fine wines or  luxury fashion items. This included high-end touchpoints at every step of the customer journey across photography, packaging, messaging, print collateral, content, and more.

Drawing inspiration from luxury brands like Saint Laurent and Tom Ford as well as modern streetwear brands like Supreme, Truffl helped create a unique brand and concept special enough to convince consumers to give Last Crumb all of their dough.

Brand Strategy

Last Crumb is a Luxury Cookie Company offering Michelin-star quality cookies handmade in Los Angeles, packaged as luxury fashion items, and sold nationwide via limited-edition drops online.

Developed by Truffl Branding Agency, Last Crumb’s brand stands for never accepting average in life. It is a delicious sugary challenge of sorts for folks to take life more seriously and themselves less so.

It’s a war cry to individuals to lace up their boots, get their asses out the door and chase down their dreams with reckless abandonment, while never forgetting to make a bit of time, every once in a while, to kick back, smile, and enjoy a damn delicious and wildly handsome cookie.

These themes of rebelliousness, and of mastery, were the foundation for all aspects of the Last Crumb brand strategy as Truffl endeavored to elicit feelings of momentousness, humor, and elevation at each stage of the customer experience.

They built a memorable brand personality for Last Crumb that blends the ethos of the culinary world’s rebel-chef-storyteller, Anthony Bourdain, together with the braggadocio of The Most Interesting Man in the World. 

And they identified and targeted several customer personas including luxury shoppers seeking high end status symbols, millennial scenesters desiring memorable social media share-worthy experiences, corporate gift-givers wanting an alternative to the typical wine and cheese baskets, and foodies who seek out only the best in every bite.

Brand Identity

Last Crumb’s visual concept built off concepts of luxury, boldness, rebelliousness, and minimalism. Truffl sought to create a brand  system that felt premium without being stodgy, and edgy without being wild. To thread that needle, Truffl built a minimalist brand identity made special with thoughtful, surprising, and often excessive details.

For example, Last Crumb’s typography system disrupts normal conventions by mixing numerous font treatments in each line of copy.

In addition, they created a cookie symbol with XX’d out eyes as a key brand element. The crosses are used as a trademark of sorts – placed over the eyes of models in lifestyle imagery.

Packaging Copy

As a luxury direct-to-consumer company, a memorable packaging experience is essential to Last Crumb’s success. Otherwise, why not simply visit your neighborhood bakery?

Each cookie is individually packaged in matte coated bags, featuring Last Crumb’s signature cookie names, such as “50 Cent” for its Birthday Cake Cookie, in addition to a unique serial number reflecting the batch of cookies in which it was baked.

On the reverse side of each bag, Truffl included a full story about each cookie as well as a QR code to join Last Crumb’s mailing list for future drops.

Each set of cookies arrives in custom rigid boxes that create a ‘wow’ moment when opened.  The boxes feature custom inserts positioning every cookie at a 45 degree angle for the perfect reveal.

The final step in the packaging experience is a memorable shipper box that arrives on customers’ doorsteps. While most brands overlook shipper boxes, the Last Crumb shipper is a whopping 3-foot wide box overlaid with a collage of brand photos that will make recipients the envy of neighbors and social media followers alike.

Brand Voice

Truffl developed a brand voice that charismatically brought to life Last Crumb’s personality with copy notable for its dark humor, creativity, and brashness.

The first step was developing their brand name, “Last Crumb,” which builds off the brand’s unique business model of selling in limited edition drops and their focus on quality “to the last crumb.”

They then created the brand tagline “Never Crumble” which is not only a statement about their cookie quality, but also serves as a manifesto for the brand’s outlook on life. 

Finally, Truffl partnered with famed copywriter Cole Schaffer to create humorous, inventive cookie names for each of Last Crumb’s 12 signature cookies.  And they gave Schaffer free reign to get as abstract, funny, random and inventive as he could with 12 cookie descriptions. The result is copy as memorable as each bite of cookie.

Photography

Truffl’s aim for product photography was to bring to life Last Crumb’s masculine, rebellious brand identity and create high fashion imagery with sex appeal.

The agency partnered with photographer Audrey Ma to produce a dynamic seriesphotography and GIFs for the brand website, packaging and social media that make one thing clear: these aren’t your grandma’s chocolate chip cookies!