Background

Crafting a Bespoke Brand

For more than a century and spanning four generations, the Hamilton family has been working one-on-one with clients to customize shirts to their unique size, style, lifestyle, and sensibility. As they continue to marry stylish design and informed craftsmanship, their work is driven by the mantra “quality above all,” which influences how they select materials, pursue craft, and provide exceptional personalized service.

Hamilton partnered with Frank & Victor ten years ago to design and develop a custom shirt building experience for their ecommerce site that would replicate the personal attention to detail and fit a customer would look forward to when shopping in the Hamilton store. Since then, Frank & Victor has refreshed their main site three times and recently created an ecommerce store for the new Hamilton sister brand, Hamilton Women’s.

The success of those initial projects paved the way for Frank & Victor to conduct a complete Hamilton rebrand including identity, print, packaging, photography, illustration, custom HTML emails, and web ads. And after 44 years in the same brown building, Frank & Victor lead the revitalization of the Hamilton store exterior including a fresh coat of paint (appropriately named Cotton Balls) and new, confident signage.

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Expanding a legacy

Merging Past & Present

Before working with Frank & Victor, Hamilton had limited web presence, was outdated, and only spoke to an older generation. The objective was to maintain the brand’s long-standing identity as classic, clean, and luxurious while appealing to a more extensive range of clientele such as a successful businessman, his wife, a retired doctor, or a wealthy rancher.

The new Hamilton website’s custom online shirt builder allows both men and women to conveniently order custom shirts through various options that suit their unique measurements and fashion sensibility. Streamlining the custom process further, user accounts store a customer’s fit size and auto-populates the site as they shop.

“Because Hamilton is known for its high-end and tailored in-store shopping experience, it was essential we captured the feeling of the online shopping experience as much as possible while also educating the customer on how it differs from other brands.”

Chris Visit, Principal

Balancing Perceptions

Multiple Audiences, One Voice

It required some finesse to create a cohesive brand experience for Hamilton Shirts as a whole while still seamlessly pivoting between its sub-brands: 1883 Sport Shirts, Western Shirts for Lyle Lovett, and Hamilton Women’s. Because these sub-brands each have a different target audience, branding had to feel unique yet connected and maintain an up-scale and high-end feel without appearing stodgy. With Hamilton’s century long business reputation, we had to be cognizant of its history and legacy while ensuring it continues to evolve and avoids becoming stale or irrelevant.

Hamilton Shirts