Design Director · 2017–2018

Beni

Naming, brand, and ecommerce launch for customizable Moroccan rugs — made to order by weavers in the Atlas Mountains and shipped to customers worldwide.

Context

A rug made to order, an ocean away

Beni sells handwoven Moroccan rugs direct from weavers in the Atlas Mountains. Every rug is custom: the customer picks pattern, size, and color online, and a weaver makes it by hand.

We took it from idea to launch — name, brand, site, and the customization flow.

Complication

Two users on opposite ends of one order

A custom rug asks a lot of the buyer: commit to a product that doesn't exist yet, made by someone they'll never meet, and wait for it. The same order has to arrive at the loom as something a weaver can make.

The flow had to work for both — confidence for the customer online, clarity for the maker on the loom.

Approach

Go to the source

We traveled to Morocco with the team — Marrakesh and the Atlas Mountains — to meet the weavers, see the process, and shoot the content the brand would launch on.

The trip did three jobs at once: brand inspiration, product research, and production. The identity, the copy, and the photography all came back from the same place the rugs come from.

Positioning

10,000 years of tradition — brought straight to your home

The rug is the oldest thing in the room and the most personal. Beni sells both: a tradition with a long lineage, and a rug no one else has.

Field Research

The brand vocabulary came off the walls. Chalk marks, scratched geometry, and painted plaster in terracotta and rose sat next to the same diamond and zigzag patterns the weavers were knotting into wool.

We studied the process end to end — raw wool, spinning, the loom — and shot it as we went. The art direction stayed close to hands and material: no styled interiors, no models, just the work.

[Detail needed: who traveled, how long, which villages or cooperatives, who shot the photography and film.]

Naming & Identity

Name. [Naming rationale — confirm whether Beni references the Beni Ourain weaving tradition, and what other directions were in play.]

Mark. A single stacked glyph built from the diamond-and-zigzag geometry found in traditional Berber rugs. It reads as a pattern before it reads as a letter, and it holds at favicon size.

Voice. Plain and specific. "Made in Morocco." "Woven in the Atlas." "The new yarn is strung onto looms." The copy leads with place and process and lets the product carry the romance.

Print — letter, postcard, cards, and the delivery van in Marrakesh

Custom Commerce

Customize. Pick your pattern, size, and colors, and Beni takes care of the rest. Each pattern is named and explained — Zag, "a simplified expression of traditional Berber geometry" — so a customer understands what they're choosing, not just how it looks. Size, wool, and color resolve into a live preview and a price.

On the other end, those same four choices are the spec. Nothing in the flow lets a customer order something a weaver can't make.

Rug customization — pattern, size, wool, color, add to cart

Story. The homepage opens on the film from the Atlas — "10,000 years of tradition, brought straight to your home" — and routes into Made in Morocco and Woven in the Atlas, the process pages that do the trust work a showroom would.

Homepage — film hero, desktop and mobile

Made in Morocco; pick your pattern, size, and colors

After the order. The confirmation email keeps the maker in the story: one of our weavers will get started on your custom rug in the next few days, and you'll hear from us when it's washed, dried, and ready to ship.

Results

[Launch date and markets shipped to]
[Orders, average order value, or custom vs. stock mix — figure TBD]
[Number of weavers or cooperatives working with Beni]

Credits

Creative direction — Greg Frye

Studio — Human NYC

Collaborators — Duncan Wolfe