A logo is more than a mark on a jar or a label. It’s the face of a company—the symbol that represents who you are and what you stand for before anyone ever tries your product.
A lot of thought went into ours.
I spent a long time developing the Standard No More logo and went through more iterations than I can remember before arriving at the design you see today. And we’re particularly proud of one thing: we didn’t hire a branding agency or design firm to create it.
I talked with a couple of friends who are graphic designers early on, but we never quite got on the same page enough to move forward. So I decided to do it myself.
And believe it or not, the entire thing was created using PowerPoint.
Every element of our logo has significance and a reason for being there.
The Bear
Standard No More is a California business and brand, and I wanted that heritage to be unmistakable.
That’s where the bear comes in.
The California Grizzly Bear immediately connects our brand to the place we call home. It’s strong, recognizable and distinctly Californian. When you see our logo, there shouldn’t be much question about where we come from.
California is part of our identity, so it deserved to be front and center in our branding.
The Crown
The crown is another prominent part of the design, but its meaning is a little different.
Standard No More grew out of my interest in men’s grooming and, particularly, the pomade community. That community has a long history of independent makers creating products themselves, experimenting with formulas and building brands from the ground up.
I wanted the crown to pay homage to that community and show respect for something that played an important role in inspiring what Standard No More would eventually become.
It’s a small way of remembering where this all started.
Why 11?
Then there’s the number 11.
Coincidentally, 11 was my sports number when I was an athlete. But that’s not exactly why it ended up in the logo.
When I started developing our first product—our Hair Styling Wax—I had never formulated a product before. Creating a stable water-based emulsion turned out to be much harder than I expected.
Attempt after attempt failed.
Then came batch number 11.
It worked.
After ten unsuccessful passes, the 11th attempt finally produced the stable emulsion I had been trying to create. It was a pretty big deal at the time. It represented persistence, experimentation and the moment Standard No More went from an idea to something that actually worked.
A milestone like that deserved a permanent place in the brand.
So 11 went into the logo.
You’ll also notice numbers associated with our individual products. Those aren’t random either. Each one has its own significance and backstory.
I’ll save those stories for another blog.
Black. White. Red.
Finally, there are the colors.
Black, white and red.
Standard No More is based in San Diego, and I wanted our visual identity to have a connection to our city.
I’ve always loved the combination of black, white and red. They’re bold, simple and timeless. They’re also colors shared by SDSU.
Having taken classes at SDSU myself, the combination felt like a natural fit and ties in a subtle way to the San Diego community we love and call home.
More Than a Logo
The bear. The crown. The 11. The colors.
None of them were chosen because they simply looked good together. Each represents a piece of the story behind Standard No More—where we’re from, where we started, what influenced us and what it took to get here.
And maybe that’s why I’m so proud that we made the logo ourselves.
It isn’t something an agency created after a few branding meetings. It grew alongside the company, one piece at a time.
Just like the products themselves.
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