Approved Freight Forwarders × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
An August study.
Approved Freight Forwarders has been moving cargo across the Pacific since 1991, and it started with the hard lane first: Guam. From there the company grew into the Jones Act markets, with its own trucks and warehouses standing at seven locations between the City of Industry headquarters and the island terminals in Hawaii and Guam. It belongs to The DeWitt Companies, a family firm four generations deep and running since 1927.
Two lines of theirs stayed with us. The promise on the website reads "proactive communication and peace of mind from end to end," and the culture inside is written as "Be 'Ohana." A freight company that talks about peace of mind and family before it talks about tonnage is our kind of company, and this study is our way of saying so.
The mark, as found
Three curved bands make the emblem, a red sweep riding over two blue ones, all leaning forward like wake behind a hull. Beside them the word APPROVED runs wide and red; beneath it, in quiet gray, sits the endorsement that explains the confidence: A DeWITT COMPANY.
Pressed
A lockup this wide wants the long axis of a luggage tag, so that is how we pressed it, running lengthwise across three leathers. A warm red tag carries the color of the word itself, and a navy tag answers the emblem's deep outer sweep. The third is pale warm greige, the shade of the DeWitt endorsement, and on it the press sits quietest. All three are blind debossed, tone on tone.
The unbroken line
Anyone who ships for a living knows the silence of a container that goes quiet somewhere past the horizon while a customer waits on the phone. Approved's promise is the opposite of that silence, and we drew it as a single stroke. The line leaves a gantry crane on the mainland dock and crosses the water in three long swells. It lifts over the islands and lands, still unbroken, at a small house on the far shore. END TO END stands above the stroke, SINCE 1991 beneath it. The whole company in one line.
On the toiletry bags the mark sits small in the lower right corner of the face, where a maker signs. We stacked a navy bag over a deep brown one, the pairing a traveling operations person would actually carry, and kept the press blind, tone on tone; a wash bag should stay quiet.
The keychains take the line at full size across the fob. One fob is pale sea-blue, the color of the water the routes cross; the other is warm red, the color the company answers to. Keys spend their days moving between terminals and rental counters, which strikes us as a fine place for a stamp about arriving.
The journals carry the mark generously in the lower right corner of the wrap, one in navy and one in pale warm greige. A notebook is where the handoff actually lives, in the numbers taken down at a counter and the call promised for Tuesday. Whether a stamp can hold anyone to a promise is another matter; it can at least keep the promise in view.
Seven harbors, one promise
The catchall tray had room for a bigger drawing, so it received the chart. The mainland coast enters at the upper right and a chain of islands crosses the middle of the roundel; far to the west sits one small harbor alone, where the story began in 1991. Seven anchors in all, one for each of the company's locations, joined by route lines that bow the way the emblem's sweeps do. We will admit the chart takes a liberty, since the City of Industry headquarters sits a good few miles inland, but on a map of this company every location reads as a harbor, and we let the drawing say so.
The tray presses in golden tan, the single leather we cut these in, and it may be the most honest piece in the study: the flat place by the door, or on a hotel desk, where keys and a badge land when the day's moving is done. It greets the person, at home or on the road, after everything else has been delivered.
We made this out of love. Leatherius Woodman is on a mission to create and share artifacts of beauty, craft and love – this study is one of them, and we hope the feeling is mutual. Every image is a render – how we prototype before cutting a die.
If you're Approved Freight Forwarders and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.