Alas Social Business Design

Introduction

The main design concept is to help brand an in-progress organization, by producing a choice of typefaces, color, creating a tagline, along with creating a social media, website, and doll product mockup that can be used for the organization itself to sell their own product to people that are interested.

About Alas

Alas Social Business, is a Doll-Making business located in Baja California. Founded in 2013, this company involves indigenous women creating hand-made and custom dolls as part of their cultural heritage. Alas, the name of this company, is another name for “Wings” in Spanish, which signifies empowerment for the women. This is known as a Multicultural, binational Project, part of an institution where they do something helpful for the community. This company helps clients create hand-made dolls with a type of style created on the doll from the designer themselves to show their empowerment. The reason being is that the women working wouldn’t be able to continue their businesses since the men are more interested in them doing housework, and taking care of the family, rather than working. These hand-crafted dolls the women create in their company dresses them up as professional workers to symbolize and show that women can do more and what they want to do in the future. They are truly an intangible tool, where they’re educational, as well as being played with. The central part these women that are making these dolls reveals a gender perspective of the women’s empowerment, and a social business to sell the dolls. The guidance to their empowerment process is by implementing a design process to indigenous women manufacturing work considering their socio-cultural context, adding value to their products.

Questionaire

1) Main goals or Mission:

The main goal of the company is to create a collaboration with indigenous Mexican artisan women that settled in Baja California. Alas wants to implement both a guidance to an empowerment process with adding value to the products, and show that design and gender are related from an empathic perspective of the lives of Mexican indigenous women.

2) Challenges to achieve goals:

The women in this company want to finance in their own business. It becomes a struggle for them due to the men, mostly husbands, seeing them as being the housewives taking care of the kids and the men. Because of this, society sees this as women serving a more domestic unit.

3) Services, products, infrastructure:

The group of indigenous women that are integrated in a productive work group gets involved in a double work load. Design is the main important guide through their production of these dolls. Because of their goal to create a collaboration with indigenous women to show empowerment, the process work they are doing is to show they can plan through production, operation, quality, commercialization, and evaluation. The government organizes an Expo in Mexico City, so they could show their product at places like that to grab the audience’s attention.

4) Market (audience, clients):

Since one of the main goals of their company is to show a form of empowerment for women, the audience and clients these hand-made dolls that are being sold to would be for the female audience, both girls and women. The girls to play with, and the women to use in their house as a neat-looking antique.

5) Who are main competitors? What makes them stand out from the competition?

Dolls are considered to be one of the most common toys, so Alas’ main competitors would involve those that are toy-makers, or even doll-makers that have their own brand of dolls most kids would enjoy having. Some examples would involve popular doll manufacturing companies we have here, such as Hasbro, Mattel, American Girl, Ideal, and even MGA Entertainment. There are also websites that do sell dolls from other places, such as, “Global Sources”, “Made-In-China”, and “Alibaba”. Compared to those companies and websites, Alas’ brand of dolls are made by hand, and is a thing where indigenous women create them as part of their cultural background in their own country, and has it symbolize in a way that’s ideal to them.

6) What is this brand’s target market (clients, audience)? BE SPECIFIC

The brand’s target market would be for little girls that has an interest in playing with dolls. The clients on the other hand would mostly be for adults to find the product interesting and unique for their children. Women probably wouldn’t play with these dolls, but they would find it unique to themselves due to its creativity being hand-made, and have it seem as a type of decoration they could place anywhere in their own home

7) What will be the central ideas or key messages for the new brand?

Some of the central ideas would involve its empowerment of the hand-made creativity of the doll itself, and it’s cultural background. Some key messages would show that since these dolls are dressed as professional workers, it wouldn’t just play a role as a children’s toy, but a role in education because of the priority, appearance, and emotion the kids feel when they first see it, and think of who they want to be in the future.

8) Which attributes will it have (tone, spirit, look and feel)? 5 nouns, 5 adjectives, 5 verbs

The tone, look, and feel for the design of the product itself would be a use as both play and education. The attributes would symbolize women’s liberty, freedom, and privilege. These hand-crafted dolls are dressed as professional workers, it would play a role in education because of the priority, appearance, and makes the kids feel on who they want to be in the future. It even gives the symbolization of empowerment because women want to be who they want to be.

9) Which elements are you keeping from the current (old) branding as EQUITY?

Some elements I would keep from the current branding would be its overall logo design, since it gives a nice and well-thought background to describe the reasoning behind these dolls the indigenous women are making for their company. The wing design, it’s to give a symbol of women having an empowerment, to show that women can do what they want as their own career on what they want to be.