A hospitality brand designed to extend beyond the venue.

The Harlyn is a hospitality project in North Cornwall comprising two connected spaces:
a taproom and kitchen, and a neighbouring coffee shop, bottle shop, and farm shop trading as Harlyn Supply Co.
From the outset, the ambition was to build more than a venue – creating a brand rooted in place, capable of extending into retail, merchandise, and product without losing credibility or coherence.

Independent hospitality is notoriously difficult to scale. Margins are tight, seasonality is extreme, and brands are often built around a single physical experience with limited opportunity for extension.

The challenge at Harlyn was to create a brand that could:

• Feel genuinely rooted in North Cornwall
• Build immediate trust and local relevance
• Support multiple formats under one identity
• Extend commercially beyond food and drink

All without feeling forced, generic, or over-branded.

I led the brand strategy, naming, identity, and execution across the entire project.
This included naming both venues, defining the positioning, creating the visual and verbal identity systems, and overseeing their application across physical space, digital, menus, merchandise, marketing, and product development.

From early concept through to launch and ongoing operation, the brand has been designed, built, and implemented by me.

With an eight-month build timeline and a non-negotiable summer opening, the brand needed to exist long before the doors opened.

Rather than treating marketing as a final phase, I turned the entire build process into the campaign by publishing a weekly video diary documenting progress, decisions, and setbacks against the backdrop of Harlyn Bay.

The approach favoured consistency and honesty over polish, allowing the audience to follow the story in real time and gradually buy into the brand before it physically existed.

The core strategic decision was to anchor the brand in place.
Naming the main venue The Harlyn, after its geographical location in Harlyn Bay, allowed the brand to inherit meaning rather than manufacture it. The name carries emotional weight, local pride, and immediate authority, while creating a platform people want to buy into.

Using North Cornwall as a consistent tagline reinforced this sense of ownership and authenticity, giving the brand geographic clarity and cultural grounding.

With that foundation in place, Harlyn Supply Co. was positioned as a complementary extension, retaining the place-based naming while introducing a distinct visual language through a retro diver’s helmet picture mark. This created a flexible identity that could live comfortably across retail, merchandise, and packaging.
Key elements of execution included:

• A clear umbrella brand strategy linking hospitality, retail, and accommodation
• A visual system designed to scale across signage, menus, packaging, and merchandise
• A strong, iconic picture mark to support product and apparel ranges
• Brand guidelines defining not just visuals, but food style, atmosphere, tone, and experience
• A modular system for menus, social media, marketing materials, and the website

The brand was designed as infrastructure to support decisions, consistency, and growth, rather than as surface decoration.

• Built a highly engaged local + visitor audience before opening through a consistent pre-launch series
• Launch announcement reached 35,000+ people organically
• Clear emotional buy-in from the community, with followers sharing memories and archive imagery of Harlyn Bay
• Strong merchandise performance across apparel and accessories, extending the brand beyond the venue
• A repeatable system supporting menus, social, marketing, and the website,  designed to scale as the business grows
• A platform designed to grow beyond the physical venues

Merchandise and product now form a meaningful part of the commercial model, helping de-risk the business and extend the brand beyond seasonal hospitality trade.

This project demonstrates how place-led branding can create both emotional connection and commercial resilience.

By treating the brand as a system, grounded in geography, expressed consistently, and designed to extend, The Harlyn became more than a venue. It became a platform capable of supporting hospitality, retail, and product under a single, coherent identity.