2025
Client: Tony Chocolonely
Year: 2025
Agency: Chuck Studios
Project: Strategy and DBA design
When the brief for Tony’s Chocolonely came in, we were all excited.
Personally, it’s one of my favourite chocolate brands here in the Netherlands — not just because it’s good chocolate, but because it’s good for the chocolate industry as well.
Born as a stunt not too long ago to protest against exploitation in the cacao supply chain, today it’s an iconic, tasty product with a strong purpose: making the industry fairer for everyone, especially for farmers.
We dove into Tony’s brilliant and comprehensive brand guidelines and analysed the competitors to define its unique domain.
Tony’s bar is generous and thick.
Among all the domains we identified, we agreed as a team that “Chunkiness” is the one that speaks to it the most.
When defining a Distinctive Brand Asset (DBA) that can be truly owned by the brand, you always start by looking for something unique to the product.
Because Tony’s bar is so generous, we noticed that almost everyone snaps off a piece starting from the corner — the most “grabbable” part of the unevenly designed bar.
This is how Niel was born — named after Neil Armstrong, the OG of “firsts.”
It’s the corner that pops out of the bar, almost as if it’s eager to jump straight into your mouth.
A DBA that transforms the product into an irresistible piece of deliciousness.
Together with Niel, we identified several visual and behavioural codes to build a sandbox — a creative framework that, through consistent use, will shape a distinctive and recognisable design system for Tony’s communications.
With the flexibility of the playbook we created, we produced a series of visuals.
Inspired by old-school Disney movies, Kristy Snell used layers of glass to position the ingredients from the different flavoured bars against a paper background — visually anticipating the texture and feel of the raw wrapping paper.
The result is a vibrant series of tasty chocolate visuals, ready to be used across DOOH, online, and print.
credits
Photographer: Kristy Snell
Creative Director: Olaf Van Gerwen
Art Director: Stefano Crose
