If there was ever a category that demanded a glow-up, it’s baby care.

Frankly, it’s a segment of the CPG world that’s woefully stuck in the past. On one end, you’ve got pastel teddy bears and soft blues straight out of a 1985 nursery catalog; on the other, you’ll see clinical, medicinal brands that look like they belong in a hospital supply closet. Ultimately, modern parents are left searching for products that reflect how they live, nor do they desire to sacrifice style for function. 

Enter Shimi, a formula-feeding baby bottle designed for parents on the go, and BRANDED, the agency tasked with inventing the brand from the ground up.

The Brief: No Brand, Just a Big Idea

Shimi’s Addison Antico and Jordan Antico came to BRANDED with a product born from a boating trip with their nephew. The excursion revealed a glaring gap: no baby bottle brand had cracked the code for making advance formula bottle prep and on-the-go feeding as convenient as they should be. Functionally, the product was brilliant. But it needed a brand that could match its ambition.

Initially, the founders requested a logo and sales deck. They left with a complete brand ecosystem—visual identity, brand strategy, packaging design, copywriting, website, logo design, and motion design—all built to disrupt a category that desperately needed it.

“The baby care category, and particularly baby bottles, has fallen out of step with the needs, priorities, and tastes of today’s parents,” Lisa Simpson, Creative Director at BRANDED, explains. “Shimi celebrates this truth with a product and a vision that supports the active, ambitious lives of today’s bottle-feeding families.”

Parents First: The Strategic Foundation

BRANDED’s guiding principle was radical but straightforward for the category: speak to the parent first. The brand needed to acknowledge that happy, healthy parents create happy, healthy families—a truth that baby care brands often overlook.

This philosophy shaped every creative decision. The color palette skews sophisticated, anchored by a rich, provocative green that stands out in a sea of powder blue and bubblegum pink. The thinking behind the color palette was to provide the brand with a strong anchor color that would be appealing to a unisex parent audience, be unique in the category, and serve as a neutral base, allowing for an identity with pops of fun, bright tones. 

The baby category tends to be awash in grey and beige, and Shimi wanted to move away from that safe zone into a color story that was more visually exciting and modern. Green, being the color of life and fertility, was a perfect fit. Critically, the lighter green was selected as a gender-neutral complement to the palette, allowing the client to produce the bottle in only one color—a smart move given startup expenses.

Typography, meanwhile, is clean and modern. The unique bottle shape itself influenced the logo design, creating visual cohesion between product and brand mark.

Perhaps the most distinctive element is the verbal strategy. Headlines like “Hey baby, let’s eat” and brand lines such as “We see you. We’ve got you. And you’ve got this” speak directly to exhausted, ambitious parents who want products that get it. The tone is warm, frank, and unafraid to acknowledge the chaos of parenthood with a knowing wink.

Reimagining What Baby Care Can Be

“Today, Shimi is the market’s best and only bottle designed specifically with the needs of formula feeding families in mind,” says Simpson. “Tomorrow, the brand could grow into almost anything in the baby and family space.” 

Shimi proves that even the most established categories are ripe for reinvention when you’re willing to challenge conventions and design for the lives people actually live. By putting parents’ emotional needs and aesthetic preferences at the center of the brand design, BRANDED created more than a launch—they envisioned a blueprint for what modern baby care can look like.

Ready to build a brand that stands out? Contact BRANDED to start your project.

“Working with BRANDED has been one of the best decisions we made for Shimi. When we reached out to them last August as a small startup, they took a chance on us and made us feel like part of their family from day one. They crafted our brand identity, packaging, and website with so much creativity and care. Their team truly felt like an extension of our own.”

Addison and Jordan Antico