BRAND STRATEGY & POSITIONING

An identity built around Italian excellence

BRAND STRATEGY & POSITIONING

An identity built around Italian excellence

Valentina’s Selection is a brand development and digital commerce project dedicated to a curated selection of high-end Italian gastronomic products. The goal was to build an ecosystem capable of transforming the professional heritage of Valentina Harris into a contemporary, recognisable and desirable brand, bringing together gastronomic culture, curation, publishing and digital commerce.
Valentina Harris is a renowned chef, author and broadcaster regarded as one of the leading authorities on Italian cuisine and food culture in the United Kingdom. Author of more than 45 books devoted to Italian cooking, she has built a long career in research, education and teaching, contributing to the spread of Italian culinary culture across the British landscape.
The project therefore began with an already strongly defined identity heritage and translated it into a new brand system, designed for an international audience and for a premium segment of the gastronomic market.

BRAND IDENTITY

A mark for a gastronomic signature

The design process began with defining the visual identity of Valentina’s Selection, encompassing logo, graphic system and coordinated image.
The brand needed to communicate selection, authority and culture without resorting to the more predictable visual codes of food retail.
The logo was conceived as a distinctive element of an identity meant to live across different touchpoints: the digital platform, packaging, and promotional and editorial materials. Around the mark, a coherent visual system was built, able to maintain recognisability and perceived quality across different applications.
The identity was therefore not treated as an isolated element, but as the visual structure through which the whole project could be made recognisable.

GASTRONOMIC HERITAGE

From Italian culture to a new brand language

GASTRONOMIC HERITAGE

From Italian culture to a new brand language

The strength of the project lay in the possibility of transforming knowledge deeply rooted in Italian tradition into a contemporary experience.
Valentina Harris’s philosophy — grounded in authenticity, seasonality, the quality of raw ingredients and the celebration of regional traditions — became a design criterion.
The brand had to communicate the provenance and refinement of the products without turning tradition into a nostalgic code.
The result was a positioning within the territory of Italian food excellence, aimed at an audience willing to recognise value not only in the product, but in the story, expertise and curation behind it.

CURATION & PRODUCT EXPERIENCE

Selection as a form of storytelling

The catalogue was built around highly selected Italian products, sourced from different territories and producers. Organic ingredients, certified products and specialities rarely found on the international market made up an offering designed for a gourmet audience.
Valentina’s personal selection was the project’s main point of differentiation: each product gained value through the expertise of the person who had chosen it and through the gastronomic context in which it was presented.
The shopping experience thus became a form of curation.
Value did not lie solely in the ingredient, but in the relationship between product, origin, recipe, expertise and narrative.

UX ARCHITECTURE

Designing the path from desire to purchase

UX ARCHITECTURE

Designing the path from desire to purchase

The distinctive nature of the e-commerce platform called for a particularly articulate UX design.
The starting point could be a recipe, but the journey had to lead the user toward a concrete selection of ingredients and toward building their own order.
The user experience was therefore designed to create fluid connections between editorial content, recipes, ingredients, products and purchase.
The information architecture had to make a complex commercial system legible without diminishing the narrative experience.
The project thus addressed a central question in digital commerce: how to turn inspiration into intention, and intention into action, while preserving the emotional and cultural value of the content along the way.

RECIPE-DRIVEN COMMERCE

When a recipe becomes a point of entry

One of the project’s most distinctive elements was the direct relationship between recipes and products.
The recipe was not a secondary piece of content within the e-commerce experience: it became a genuine gateway to the gastronomic selection.
Users could start from the editorial experience of a recipe and arrive at the ingredients chosen to make it, turning content into a concrete purchasing experience.
This approach introduced a commerce model particularly consistent with the brand’s positioning: not simply offering products, but building desire through knowledge, connecting storytelling, expertise and conversion.

ART DIRECTION & FOOD PHOTOGRAPHY

Raw ingredients as
visual protagonists

ART DIRECTION & FOOD PHOTOGRAPHY

Raw ingredients as visual protagonists

The art direction gave photography a strategic role in building perceived value. Ingredients, preparations and products needed to be portrayed through a visual language capable of conveying quality, authenticity and desirability.
For the photographic production, a collaboration was developed with Ian Garlick, a highly regarded and talented British food photographer.
His sensitivity in portraying raw ingredients and the world of food culture helped define the project’s visual imagery.
Photography thus became an integral part of the brand system: not a mere support to the product, but a tool for positioning, storytelling and art direction.

EDITORIAL DESIGN

A single language between digital and print

The design work was not limited to e-commerce.
The communication system also included promotional and editorial materials, as well as printed communication tools, developed according to the same visual grammar as the digital identity.
Logo, typography, imagery, composition and information hierarchies were coordinated to build a coherent brand presence across the different touchpoints.
The editorial component took on a strategic role: it allowed the cultural dimension of Valentina Harris to be carried into the brand, transforming commercial communication into a more authoritative and recognisable experience.

THE SPHERICAL METHOD IN ACTION

THE SPHERICAL METHOD
IN ACTION

In the Valentina’s Selection project, the Spherical Method was applied as a principle of integration between identity, content, product, technology and behaviour.
The project was not approached as the sum of a logo, an e-commerce platform and a series of communication materials.
These elements were treated as parts of a single system, built around a precise core: Italian gastronomic culture interpreted through the expertise and curation of Valentina Harris.
From this core stem the branding choices, the UX structure, the editorial language, the photographic direction and the way products are presented.
Coherence is therefore not achieved by making the elements uniform, but by establishing precise relationships between them.
This is the key difference from a purely aesthetic approach: design does not act only on the final form, but organises the relationships that allow the brand to function as a system.

CREATIVE DIRECTION

A single vision for a multidisciplinary ecosystem

CREATIVE DIRECTION

A single vision for a multidisciplinary ecosystem

Creative Direction, Art Direction, Branding, Visual Design, UX Design and Editorial Design converged into a unified design direction.
The challenge was to keep the aesthetic level, the clarity of the experience and the commercial strength of the system all high at the same time.
The result was an ecosystem in which identity and functionality did not run on separate tracks: visual quality contributed to understanding, while the structure of the experience reinforced the positioning.
Valentina’s Selection therefore represents a case of strategic digital design for premium food, in which brand identity, e-commerce, UX, content strategy, photography and publishing are designed as a single brand system.

PROJECT LEGACY

A contemporary digital commerce project

The Valentina’s Selection e-commerce platform is not currently online.
The project nonetheless retains significant design value for the complexity of its architecture and for its ability to anticipate a logic increasingly present in digital commerce today: using content and expertise as the engine of the commercial experience.
The platform connected an authoritative personal brand, a highly curated gastronomic selection, an editorial system and a UX journey oriented toward conversion.
The result was a premium food e-commerce model in which design did not merely present the offering, but built the context necessary to understand and perceive its value.