There's a convention in kitchen goods that the front of a thing is advertising space. A logo, centred, in the brand's colour, at the size the brand would like.
Ours isn't. The front of every bag in this range carries the cloth it was printed or woven with, and our name is on the back in one colour, about the size of a care label.
People ask, so here's the reasoning.
We didn't draw these patterns
They came with the cloth. The workshops that print and weave it have been making these designs for their own market — bakery doodles in black ink, amber shop-sign lettering, honeycomb woven into jacquard, laundry symbols, leaves, daisies on sage green.
We chose the ones we'd want in our own kitchen. We didn't commission them and we didn't redraw them into a house style.
That last part was a real decision, and the obvious alternative was available: take the same cloth, strip the pattern, put a wordmark where the pattern was. That's what a lot of brands do, and it would have made the range look more designed.
It would also have been the less honest object. The pattern is the work of the people who make it. Replacing it with our name would claim a piece of authorship we don't have.
A bag of bread shouldn't shout
There's a practical half to this too.
The thing lives on a counter or hangs on a hook, in a room that already has a logo on the kettle, the toaster, the coffee tin and the washing-up liquid. One more brand name at eye level is not what any kitchen needs.
A pattern reads as cloth. A wordmark reads as packaging. We'd rather it looked like something you own than something you bought.
Two bags take this furthest — they have no lettering on them anywhere, front or back except the name.
The two with no lettering at all
What's actually on the back
Four lines, one colour, small:
- The name.
- What it's made of — cotton and food-grade beeswax.
- The size, where we have a confirmed figure from the maker. Where we don't, we leave the line off rather than estimate. A guessed dimension is worse than a missing one.
- How to wash it: wipe cool, hang dry, no machine.
That last line is there because it's the one thing that decides whether the bag lasts years or one wash. On the Washday we gave up and printed the care instructions across the front as the pattern, which is the most useful joke in the range.
The same thinking, elsewhere
It's the reason every product page has a section called what it won't do, listing the four things these bags are bad at. It's the reason our storage guides recommend a wooden board and a freezer — both free — before they recommend anything we sell. It's the reason our own buying guide lists three households who should keep their money.
And it's why we say plainly that beeswax isn't vegan on a page you don't have to hunt for, with four alternatives we don't sell.
None of that is a marketing position we adopted. It's what happens if you assume the person reading will find out anyway.
A bag that's been used for a year looks used. We think that's the point.
What separates the eight, and which suits which loaf: three levels of closed, eight cloths.