Giving the best food you can feed your dog an equally fetching look

There are a lot of dog food brands out there, both traditional players and snazzy upstarts, but the fact is, most of them are just different flavors of the same two categories: kibble and fresh or frozen raw. The first is cheap and lacks nutrition, the second is expensive, messy, and inconvenient. After almost a decade working in the industry, Michael Goldman knew there had to be a better way.

So, he launched Tally’s Ranch, named after his adopted dog and the ingredients, sourced from American farms and ranches. It’s an entirely new format: freeze-dried food, which is shelf-stable and easy to serve, but miles and miles more nutritious than kibble (or even raw).

Michael engaged Saunter pre-launch to take a disparate set of elements and turn it into a cohesive brand story and identity, and create a website that reflected the impactful innovation and the spirit of the brand.

  • Brand strategy and identity

  • Art direction

  • Copywriting

  • Web design

  • Social content

  • Email design

  • Performance marketing creative

Step 1: Develop a strategic foundation

Dog food is a crowded market. We needed to make sure the Tally’s Ranch identity was grounded in a firm understanding of why, not just what.

Step 2: Create a scalable brand design system

Michael had a small team that needed to make an outsized impact. We delivered a comprehensive, custom-built design system and component library in Figma to amplify their limited resources.

We designed a color palette that captured a warm, agrarian feeling — like harvest on the farm. The brand primarily leverages the green, tan, and brown, so for those hues, we added shades to give the digital system more versatility.

The typography employs the expressive, hand-drawn Hanley Pro Sans and Script Alt in the headlines, balanced with iA Writer Quattro, a mostly-monospaced font with proportionally wider glyphs for characters like M or W. This gives it the utilitarian attitude we sought, with more humanistic legibility.

Step 3: Put beauty into action

Brands succeed in the execution. Working closely with the Tally’s Ranch growth marketers and social media teams, we made sure the implementation of the brand fit tactical and practical goals.

Thanks for checking us out!

If you enjoyed the work we did for Tally’s Ranch, we’d love to talk about how we can do something similar (or totally different) for your brand.