Staples Mill Antiques

A brand identity case study for Staples Mill Antiques, a stone sawmill built in 1859 that houses three floors and thirty independent dealers, with a smokestack you can see from the north end of Main Street. It is one of the most distinctive buildings in Stillwater.

None of that came through anywhere a customer might look first. The shop had no website, its Google listing was unclaimed, and its social presence was quiet and inconsistent. The problem was not that the brand was bad. It was that the brand was hiding the one thing no competitor could copy: the building itself, and the 165 years inside it.

The refresh leads with the mill. The mark rebuilds the shop's hand-painted sign into a clean vertical lockup, the rays reading as morning light through tall mill windows. The palette stays warm and storied without tipping into costume, held together by a slab serif for weight and a clean sans for readability.

From there I launched the shop's first website, claimed and built out its local search presence, and designed a social system the owner could actually run: five recurring content buckets, a weekly cadence, printed shot lists, and a custom animated intro and outro that bookend every Reel so a feed of loose clips reads as one brand.

The work was done free of charge and handed off with documentation, so it keeps running without me. A brand identity case study by Caspar Gabor, Current Creative Co.