The Brief
Burny Wild’s started as a question: what happens when a brand design studio builds something from scratch with no client brief, no constraints, and no one to answer to but ourselves? It started as a creative exercise inside MRC. We wanted to know what it felt like to take every principle we apply to client work and push it as far as it could go. Then we partnered with our friend Chef Bobby McFarland, developed a recipe, and shared it with people who could not stop eating it. The creative exercise became a real product. The product became a brand.
Burny Wild’s Adventure Sauce is a carrot-forward condiment with a little bit of sweet and a little bit of heat. Vegan, gluten-free, no preservatives, no stabilizers. We took it from recipe development to a successful Kickstarter campaign, into production, onto shelves at Weaver Street Market and through farmers’ markets across North Carolina.
The Work
Everything you see on a Burny Wild’s touchpoint came out of this studio. The naming. The brand strategy. The character of Dr. Bernard Elias “Burny” Wild, a fictional explorer who sources ingredients from the farthest reaches of the earth. The hand-illustrated identity system. The packaging and label design, down to the nutritional facts panel and every production detail that goes into getting a food product onto a shelf. The Shopify website. The photography direction. The messaging framework and brand voice that gave Burny a personality as bold and specific as the sauce itself.
We developed custom iconography, patterns, and a color system built to expand across flavors and product lines. The packaging was designed with sustainable materials through our partnership with noissue, whose custom tissue paper, stickers, and packing tape extended the brand experience into the unboxing. We partnered with 1% for the Planet because the brand’s values demanded it, not as a marketing play.
The label design alone taught us more about food packaging production than years of client work could have. Regulatory requirements, co-packer specifications, shelf-ready print production, substrate choices. When we design packaging for a client now, we are drawing on the experience of having done it for ourselves, with our own money and reputation on the line.
The Brand Beyond the Bottle
This is where Burny Wild’s became something bigger than a sauce. Mike wrote and illustrated a full comic book, “Episode 1: Escape From The Fumara,” that takes readers on an adventure with the Burny character. We designed merchandise: shirts, stickers, art prints, all eco-friendly, all extending the brand world. We built social media strategy and content from the ground up, growing the Instagram following by over 500 in the first two months. We created marketing campaign templates, seasonal promotions, and a brand voice that made every post feel like it came from a friend, not a company.
Burny Wild’s is the purest demonstration of what a full-service brand design partnership looks like when nothing is off the table. Naming, strategy, identity, illustration, packaging, product development, website, e-commerce, content, campaigns, merch, comics, sustainable partnerships. Every discipline MRC offers a client, we tested on ourselves first.
Live a little.
