Hasta La Ideas

SuperShe started life in 2016 as a women’s only private island in the Baltic Sea founded by Kristina Roth, the idea being that it would be a place where women could find community, form bonds and lift each other up.

After a fair bit of criticism that a networking session which costs £3,500 is more elitist than empowering, Roth changed track, realising that a private island would be inaccessible to many women, and deciding to bring the community onto an app instead.

&Walsh, Jessica Walsh’s recently formed agency, was commissioned to work on the branding, strategy and merch for SuperShe. It’s a fitting project for the designer given that &Walsh is one of the 0.1% of design agencies founded, owned and run solely by women.

“When looking at other women’s communities, we realised that many of them were overly prescribing the way women in that community ‘should be’. Be a girl boss, travel the world and wear your nightly face masks.

“Feminism had become commodified and there was no one in the space allowing women to claim their own version of themselves. With this in mind, the SuperShe community is designed to help women become confident in their own path in life, whatever that may be,” says Walsh.

The identity eschews the millennial pink aesthetic adopted by feminist brands over the past few years, including women’s co-working space The Wing. Instead, it takes inspiration from protest posters from women’s marches throughout history, including protests about equal pay and the Women Strike for Peace movement.

The agency developed a custom brush font which aims to be “loud and confident” but also “friendly and fun”, according Walsh, and is paired with secondary fonts Panamera and Bureau Grot.

Meanwhile, the app’s range of merch is always displayed in pairs with different messages to demonstrate how women don’t have to be defined in a singular way, such as ‘super boss’ and ‘super chill’.

“We also found that this same consumer who was tired of the commodified feminism ‘rah rah’ was also tired of all the BS claims on products today,” says Walsh.

“SuperShe products were designed with no false claims. The candles are not going to make your dreams come true and the body soaps contain no magic healing powers for your romantic relationships. Our goal was to create honest communication in a market saturated with fluff.”

Read CR’s interview with Jessica Walsh about her career journey so far here; andwalsh.com

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