Ong Shunmugam unveils new brand identity

SINGAPORE - Contemporary Singaporean womenswear designer Ong Shunmugam recently underwent a full rebranding exercise spearheaded by the team at TSLA Design, the design and branding practice of The Secret Little Agency (TSLA).

The refreshed identity was an effort to encapsulate the growing aspirations and broadened perspective of the five-year old label as it plans to step outside of Singapore and onto the global stage.

“It's a great privilege to work with a homegrown brand with similar ambitions as ours to champion Asian design to the world,” Hanyi Lee, chief creative officer of TSLA, said in a statement. “The collaborative process of translating traditional Asian cues into a contemporary fashion experience has been deliberate, authentic and rewarding.”

The new brand was revealed together with the recent launch of a new flagship store, and the introduction of the Ong Shunmugam Custom line of bespoke womenswear.

TSLA Design was tasked with developing the refreshed identity for the brand. The key design considerations for the project included communicating the brand’s characteristic spirit of quiet defiance, as well as echoing the brand’s ethos of recontexualising Asian aesthetic traditions.

The design solutions also had to be built into a scalable brand system that could grow alongside the company’s brand universe, and continue to be seamlessly applied across multiple platforms, including digital and retail touchpoints.

The lynchpin of the new identity is the Ong Shunmugam logotype, inspired by the anatomy of traditional Mandarin and Tamil handwritten script, the agency said. A new monogram was also introduced, showcasing the brand's name in their native characters—as opposed to the romanised initials typically used in this format.

More defined and distinct brand rituals have also been incorporated into the retail experience for customers. These include a seasonal Rangoli symbol that becomes the individual mark of every Ong Shunmugam collection and derived from the auspicious Indian decoration that celebrates the beginning of harvest.

A final brand ritual, closes the end of the customer journey with the ceremonial closing of the Ong Shunmugam shopping bags, which feature a contemporary interpretation of the traditional Chinese Prosperity Knot.