Building Parkside From the Ground Up
We partnered with Parkside to build a dog nutrition brand from the ground up. When the engagement started, there was no name, no logo, no packaging, and no website. There was a founding team with a clear point of view on what dogs should be eating, a set of functional treat recipes, and a launch window.
The Parkside Shopify store launches in October 2026 and gets its own write-up. This is the story of everything that had to exist before a single product page could be built: the name, the identity system, the packaging on the shelf, the pricing and subscription model, the email program, and the operational backbone that gets a bag of treats from a co-packer to a customer's door.
It's also the clearest example we have of what we actually are. Most people find us because we build custom Shopify storefronts. Parkside is what it looks like when a brand hands us the whole launch.
What Did Parkside Need Before It Could Launch?
Parkside came to us as a product, not a brand. The founders had developed a line of functional dog treats built around real, recognizable ingredients: salmon and egg for cognitive support, turkey and blueberries for recovery, sweet potato with flaxseed, pumpkin, and ginger for digestion. The formulation work was serious. The brand work hadn't started.
The brief was to bring that product line to market as a premium DTC brand with a strong retail presence, which meant the scope extended far beyond a traditional web project. We were essentially building the foundation of a new company from the ground up.
A name that could be owned, trademarked, and grown into a product range beyond treats. A visual identity that felt premium in the same way a good human wellness brand feels premium, without reading as clinical or cold. Packaging that worked across a functional product line and could scale into supplements. A pricing and subscription strategy that made sense for a consumable with a natural reorder cadence. Lifecycle email flows ready to go live on day one. And a fulfillment partner, because none of the above matters if the product can't ship.
We scoped it as a single launch engagement rather than a series of disconnected projects. That decision shaped everything that followed, because the name informed the mark, the mark informed the packaging system, and the packaging system now informs the website.
Workstreams: Naming, brand identity, packaging, ecommerce strategy, and operations, run as one engagement. 3 launch SKUs: Brain Support Bites, Recovery Jerky Bars, and Digestive Chews, with an upcoming supplement line designed alongside them. 1 system: Every deliverable built from the same identity foundation, so the website inherits it rather than reinventing it.
How We Named Parkside
Naming a pet brand in 2026 is mostly a process of elimination. The category is crowded with names that lean on one of three ideas: the dog as a member of the family, the "wild" ancestral diet, or a clinical, vet-approved posture. All three are well served. None of them fit a brand whose actual point of view was about intention: feeding a dog on purpose, with ingredients chosen for a specific job.
We ran the naming process the way we run most strategy work, starting with the positioning rather than the words. The brand needed to feel like a place a dog is happy to be, not a laboratory or a butcher shop. It needed to sound established on a shelf next to brands with a decade of head start. And it needed room to grow into supplements, wellness, and eventually more than treats.
Parkside met all three. It is a place, not a claim. It carries the feeling of a walk, of an active dog, of the part of the day that belongs to the animal. It is easy to say, easy to spell, and it doesn't box the brand into a single product category.
How We Built the Parkside Brand Identity
The identity had to do two jobs at once. It needed to read as premium and considered, the way a good wellness or specialty food brand reads, and it needed to be unmistakably about dogs without resorting to a paw print.
The mark
The Parkside mark is a dog's head profile built from a small set of soft, overlapping organic shapes. It reads as a dog at a glance and as an abstract form on second look, which is what lets it work at a favicon size on a website and at full size on a shipping box. The two-tone construction gives it depth without needing gradients or outlines, and it holds up in a single color for embroidery, stamps, and print.
The wordmark
The wordmark pairs a clean roman "park" with an italic "side." The shift in the middle of the word is the whole idea: the brand is grounded and trustworthy, and it also has personality. It is the one flourish in an otherwise restrained system, which is what keeps it from feeling decorative. Underneath it, the tagline sits in a wide-tracked sans serif that gives the lockup its structure.
The brand universe
From the primary lockup, we built out a complete family: the standalone mark for social avatars and small applications, a circular badge that wraps "Intentional Nutrition" around the mark for packaging seals and stickers, and a "pksd" short mark for merchandise, internal use, and places where the full name is already established. Each one is a legitimate version of the brand, not a compromise.
Color
The palette is built on green. A deep forest green anchors the system and carries the premium, established feeling; a bright lime brings the energy and reads as "active" on the shelf; a warm cream keeps the whole thing soft and approachable. We documented eight approved logo colorways across dark, light, cream, lime, and mid-green backgrounds so that anyone touching the brand, from a co-packer's print shop to a paid media designer, has a correct answer for every surface.
The dogs
The identity needed a way to show dogs without photography, which is expensive to produce consistently and hard to control at launch. We drew a set of three silhouettes, a greyhound, a dachshund, and a bulldog, each sitting inside a soft lime oval. Three very different body types make a quiet point about "every kind of dog," and the overlapping-shape construction ties them directly back to the mark. They became the visual engine of the packaging system.
How We Designed Parkside's Packaging
Packaging is where the brand had to earn its price. A DTC customer sees the bag in a photo; a retail customer holds it in their hand next to forty other bags. Both had to work.
One system, three products
Every Parkside bag shares the same architecture. A colored band across the top carries the line's promise, "Purposeful Fuel for Active Dogs," alongside three icons for the shared functional benefits: high protein, antioxidants, electrolytes. Below it, the full lockup sits centered, then the product name in a large serif, the format in lime, and the recipe line beneath it. Four short benefit points run down the right side. The circular badge closes the front panel as a seal.
What changes between products is the dog and the color. Recovery Jerky Bars, the turkey recipe, get the greyhound on deep green. Brain Support Bites, salmon with egg and omega-3, get the dachshund on lime. Digestive Chews, the sweet potato recipe, get the bulldog on cream. The dog is the product's mascot and the color is its shelf signal, so a returning customer can find their bag without reading a word.
The back panel
The back of the bag is where most pet brands fall apart, because the compliance requirements are real and the space is small. We treated it as a design problem rather than a legal afterthought. The brand statement leads, feeding guidelines get a proper column with breathing room, and the guaranteed analysis and ingredient panel sit in a structured table that is legible at print size. The dog silhouette ghosts behind the nutrition panel at low contrast, so the back is still recognizably Parkside without competing with the information.
Designed to extend
The supplement line was designed in the same pass, even though it launches later. The daily wellness chew boxes, "calm" and "focus," use the same dogs and the same organic shapes but shift the palette to a muted lavender and terracotta, with a lowercase display word doing the work the serif product name does on the bags. It proves the system can leave green behind and still be Parkside, which matters for a brand that intends to be more than treats.
How We Shaped Parkside's Ecommerce Strategy
This is the part of a brand launch that a pure design studio doesn't touch and a pure marketing agency touches too late. We built the commercial model alongside the brand so the two would agree with each other by the time the storefront was designed.
Pricing and subscription
Dog treats are a consumable with a predictable reorder cycle, which makes subscription the core of the business rather than a feature. We developed Parkside's pricing architecture and subscription strategy together: SKU, subscribe-and-save discount, bundle logic across the three products, and how the supplement line will layer in. The goal was a structure that makes the first purchase easy, the second purchase automatic, and the third purchase bigger, through bundles and add-ons rather than discounts.
That strategy is already built into the storefront. The custom cart drawer, bundle logic, and product page structure were designed around the subscription model rather than bolted on afterward, which is a large part of why the website gets its own case study.
Figma-Designed Email Designs (Klaviyo)
We designed and built Parkside's email program before the site existed, so that the day the Shopify site launches, the brand already has a voice in the inbox. Welcome series, abandoned checkout, post-purchase onboarding with feeding guidance, subscription reminder and management, winback. Every template is built in the identity system: same greens, same dogs, same serif, so the inbox and the bag feel like the same brand.
How We Helped Parkside Get Operational
A launch brief that ends at "beautiful brand, working website" leaves the founder alone with the hardest part. Parkside needed a fulfillment partner, and finding one is a research and negotiation project that most first-time CPG founders have never done.
We ran the 3PL search as part of the engagement: the output was a shortlist, a recommendation, and a partner ready to integrate with the storefront before launch. This is the part of the work we want to be clear about. We're a design studio that codes, and we're also an ecommerce strategy partner. For a new brand, the difference between those two things is whether you have a launch or a set of files.
Why Brands Bring Us Their Whole Launch
Parkside is the model for how we prefer to work with new brands. One studio, one agency, one system carried from the name to the checkout button. The alternative, a naming agency, a branding agency, a packaging designer, a Shopify agency, and a fractional ops consultant who have never met each other, produces brands that look assembled. Parkside looks like it was always going to look this way.
If you're launching a CPG or DTC brand and you need more than a website, this is what we do.
Thinking about a launch like this? Start your sprint, see more of the work on our work, or read the Olipop and Hero Cosmetics case studies.
