Neilson
Rebranding a 130-year-old dairy brand: one logo, one carton and five videos in a single term
Details
- Project
- Neilson rebrand (Neilson is one of Ontario's oldest milk brands, founded in 1893)
- Type
- Course project, University of Waterloo, 2025. The brief was to pick an existing brand and rebrand it. I chose Neilson.
- Role
- Brand analysis, slogan, logo, packaging, the main ad and its editing, and two of the four social videos
- Team
- Two people. My part is listed under Role. My partner made the other two social videos, helped with logo ideas, and gave feedback throughout.
- Tools
- Adobe Illustrator (logo), Figma (carton), video editing, a printer and a glue stick
Overview
- The problem
- The existing cartons had mixed typefaces and crowded text. The product name was hard to pick out at a glance.
- The decision
- I made the product name and milk percentage larger, kept the original N, and printed the dieline at full size to check the layout.
- What we made
- The course project produced a carton, a main ad and four Shorts. It has no sales or brand-tracking results.
At a glanceOne logo, one carton and five videos, all pointing the same way.
01 / Why Neilson
Neilson is the milk in a lot of Ontario fridges, and it looks like it has for decades: a red blackletter-style wordmark, a carton crowded with text, and eight product variants that each use slightly different type. That is what drew me to it. A brand that is everywhere and that nobody looks at is a good rebranding problem, because the personality already exists. The job is to find it and make it visible again.
I started with the brand as it stands. The wordmark reads as heritage and trust, which is worth keeping. But the cartons have five or six things wrong with them at once: too much text, mixed fonts, the word "milk" too small to read at a glance, and a design that does not say "milk" until you read it. Around the brand, the market is moving. Dairy-free alternatives are growing, younger buyers care about sustainability, and Neilson is quiet in marketing compared with newer competitors. The strengths were real too: the health information on the pack builds trust, and the red-and-blue pairing is distinctive on a shelf.
So the direction became one sentence: honour the tradition, but make it look like a brand that is still moving. The slogan came out of that. "Rooted in Tradition, Leading the Future."
02 / What I decided, and why
Keep the letter, lose the word.
The obvious move with an old wordmark is to replace it, and I went the other way. I took the "N" from the original logo, in the same typeface, and made it the whole mark. Anyone who knows Neilson recognises the letterform. Anyone who does not still gets a bold red initial that is easy to read at carton size and at thumbnail size.
Then I put it inside a white milk splash. The splash does two jobs. It says "milk" before the word appears anywhere, which the old packaging failed at, and it is a shape I could reuse on its own across social posts and video as a recurring brand element. Red stays as the accent, both because it is Neilson's colour and because it reads as Canadian. The mark comes in two versions, a white splash for navy grounds and a navy splash for white ones, so it works on the carton and on a white page.
Design the carton as one thing, not eight.
The new carton starts from a single navy field so that the range reads as one brand instead of eight colour-coded boxes. On the front, three things carry the hierarchy: "2%" and "MILK" set large, the splash-and-N mark below, and a pour of milk running down the side to give it movement. Everything else (Foodland Ontario, the vitamin line, the 1L) drops to a supporting size.
The side and back panels carry the practical information. The nutrition table sits on a white panel where it is easy to read. "100% Canadian milk" with a maple leaf sits at the top of the front and back. The back panel carries a short bilingual note, "Neilson, your family dairy / votre laiterie familiale", and a line about fresh milk from local farms since 1893, because the family-and-community story is what Neilson has that a new oat-milk brand does not. Sustainability shows up as icons (recycling, the open-other-side note) rather than as a slogan.
Make it physical.
A carton design on a screen tells you nothing about how it looks in a hand or on a table. So I printed the dieline at full size, cut it out, and glued it onto real milk cartons. Those cartons are the props in the main ad. It was the best decision in the project, because every mistake in the layout (a line too small, a panel too busy) showed up on the physical carton before it showed up on camera.
One main ad, four Shorts, one campaign.
The main ad carries the slogan and the family story. My partner and I shot it together; I edited it, with feedback from my partner along the way. The four social videos are YouTube Shorts, short and vertical, shot in everyday places (one is set in a gym) so the carton appears in normal life rather than on a set. I made two of the Shorts and my partner made the other two, all built from the same mark, colours and splash so they read as one campaign.
03 / Results
- 1 brand analysis (visual audit, market pressures, strengths and weaknesses of the current packaging)
- 1 slogan, 1 logo, 1 carton dieline, and physical cartons made from it
- 1 main advertisement and 4 YouTube Shorts, all on the new identity
This was a course project, so there are no sales or brand-tracking numbers behind it. What the page can show is the whole system, from the audit through to the videos, all pointing the same way.
What I learned
The logo turned out to be the smallest part of the work. Making the carton, the ad, the Shorts and the slogan agree with each other took the rest of the term, and that consistency is where most of the effort in branding goes. I came away with a lot more respect for the brand teams whose work I had been walking past in the dairy aisle.
The other lesson was to make a physical version as early as possible. Printing the carton was the point where the project stopped being slides and started being a product, and it changed decisions I would not have questioned on screen.
