The archive · Brand & Identity · Strategic decision · 2022
Carrot's rebrand draws waste as valuable specimens, using a custom-built drawing tool
Heydays renamed a waste-management software firm Carrot and built its identity from bold schematic drawings of each waste type, made with a bespoke tool.
Carrot
What it had to solve
Carrot is a waste-management software brand that tackles the two-billion-tonne global waste problem by collecting data. Heydays had to position the brand as a breath of fresh air in the industry, and chose to start with the name.
How it works
Carrot is a waste-management software brand built around a simple premise: the world's two-billion-tonne waste problem can be tackled with data. Design studio Heydays was asked to position the young company as a breath of fresh air in an industry most people would rather not think about.
Heydays started with the name. The brand became Carrot, and the identity stopped apologizing for its subject: different types of waste are displayed as schematic but bold and powerful images, drawn with a tool the studio developed specifically for the project. What most companies would call garbage is treated as something worth cataloguing and looking at.
The result is a brand system whose hero is the very material the industry manages — waste shown as valuable, clean specimen form rather than grime. The point of the work is the flip: a company in an unpleasant category can make its own subject matter the most beautiful thing it owns.
Why it lands
- A fresh, positive name does the positioning work before anyone sees a logo: Carrot sounds healthy in an industry that sounds heavy.
- Cataloguing waste types in bold schematic illustrations gives the company's subject matter dignity, so the identity and the mission become the same picture.
- Building a dedicated drawing tool forced a consistent, ownable visual language that a stock-photo approach could not produce.
- By making waste the hero, the identity removes the shame that keeps people from engaging with recycling and waste data in the first place.
What it did
The identity put garbage on a pedestal: waste types became the brand's hero imagery instead of its shame, and the work earned a place in the D&AD awards archive under Branding.
What you can take
An industry perceived as dirty can flip its own material: give the unwanted thing beautiful systematic form and the category's problem becomes its signature.
Since then
The identity for Carrot was made by Oslo sister studios Heydays and Goods and was covered by design press in early 2022; it is preserved in the D&AD awards archive under Branding. No sales or funding figures appear in the archive entry, so the case stands on a design move: an industry built on refuse can lead with beauty instead of apology.
Sources
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