Our Leeds studio used comic style storytelling with its latest project for Doctor Kluger’s Olde Towne Tavern.
Doctor Kluger’s Olde Towne Tavern is the latest opening for The Breakfast Club, who own seven bars across London.
With a secret entrance found along a corridor at the Canary Wharf crossrail, Doctor Kluger’s is an exciting and mysterious addition to the iconic portfolio. As with all of The Breakfast Club bars, there is a story to tell, an engaging brand identity and a unique interior that helps each bar stand out from its many competitors.
We were charged with creating an equally exciting and captivating identity for Doctor Kluger’s. In keeping with the ethos behind The Breakfast Club brand, Doctor Kluger’s needed to make eating and drinking a unique and memorable experience – somewhere that takes people on a mysteriously fun and imaginative journey.
Alongside the brief to create an entire look, feel and personality behind the mysterious Doctor Kluger name, Elmwood was also tasked to design the bottle for its own brand of ‘Good Time Tonic’ cocktails.
With no background story to tell, the Leeds team were free to create a fictitious story and invent the character behind the name. After immersing themselves into the fantasy world of the Doctor – they found an inventive outsider. An eccentric recluse who had dedicated his whole life’s work to developing something that he claims revolutionised Saturday night culture.
Doctor Kluger is the make-believe brainchild behind a machine created for one specific purpose – to power and rotate mirrored disco balls. His invention changed Saturday nights forever. And, as a celebration of his remarkable achievement, he opened his own bar and decorated it out with fully operational powered mirror balls.
The tale of Doctor Kluger is told in all aspects of the bar’s interior. From entering the Doctor’s waiting room door to seeing a mural of the prototype machine painted on the wall and the real mirror balls hanging inside the bar.
Rob Skelly, Senior Designer at Elmwood, says:
This has been a creative dream for Elmwood. We have been given the opportunity to create a make-believe story from scratch and then tell it in the real world. The first thing we needed to do was write Doctor Kluger’s history. We needed to give Doctor Kluger a personality – who he is and how he came to own a bar. We deliberately avoided representing the Doctor visually and this helped keep the air of mystery around the person behind the name.
Jonathan Arana-Morton, founder of The Breakfast Club, says: “We’ve worked with Elmwood for a decade now. Every time the brief changes and every time, without fail, they’ve managed to deliver. The back stories for our bars are hugely important in adding personality – whether it be a swashbuckling explorer, or in this case a mad reclusive inventor. They say every picture paints a thousand words, so the identities created by Elmwood are important in giving the customer a story in which to buy into.”
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