Brand Identity for Bonnie Clyde Eyewear
Mouthwash Studio evolved Bonnie Clyde's eyewear identity from a cult favorite into a scalable, romance-led brand world. Grounded in Shakespearean drama and historical visual research, the system combines a custom wordmark, expressive illustration, rich color, content direction, web design, motion, and augmented reality.
Insights
- The Shakespearean frame comes from the brand's name, not from eyewear: Bonnie and Clyde were a couple who loved each other to the death, and the brand describes its own name as a testament to the madness one endures for love. Mouthwash followed that to Romeo and Juliet, and its case puts the finding plainly — the answer was hiding in plain sight, because the name already carried drama, passion and emotional intensity.
- The reference was in the product line before it was in the identity: Bonnie Clyde already sold a frame called Mercutio, named for the Romeo and Juliet character, so the rebrand formalised a thread the brand had been pulling on by itself.
- The trigger was success, not decline. A breakout product pushed a cult label into the mainstream — the brand's visibility came largely through being photographed on Beyoncé, Bella Hadid, Hailey Bieber and Kendall Jenner — and the research phase found a category caught in a cycle of sameness, with competitors gravitating to minimalism and restraint while the culture was moving toward romance, fantasy and craft.
- The system is built from historical research rather than references: a custom wordmark grounded in Anglo-Saxon manuscript letterforms, a palette described as having a past life, and a library of crests and cherubs assembled as a modern mythology. The credits list the Herb Lubalin Study Center of Design & Typography and the New York Public Library as research partners, which is where the letterforms actually came from.
- Look closely at the wordmark and the product rhymes with the type: the sharpened ovals read as an eye and its socket, echoing the plastic of the frames themselves, and there is a heart tucked inside the E. The strategy line — love as the lens — turns out to be literal.
- The client asked for Live Laugh Love to be part of the brand. Instead of refusing, the studio translated the phrase into Latin and hid it as an easter egg inside the illustrations, where it reads as an ancestral motto rather than a kitchen poster.
- Mouthwash began as a print magazine and a podcast before it was a studio, and titled its own essay on the project "Are You Willing To Die For Your Brand?" — a literal question for a brand named after Bonnie and Clyde.
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