Blacksmith Brands: Logo for new consumer products company

Blacksmith Brands

Blacksmith Brands is a newly formed company with significant financial backing, created to grow well-known brands in the Personal Care and Over-The-Counter Drug industries. We will acquire major brands, often from world-wide companies, and then aggressively build those brands via product innovation, strong marketing (including large amounts of consumer advertising and promotion) and broadened retail distribution in America's largest food drug and mass retailers -- outlets such as Wal-Mart, Target, Walgreen's, CVS, Kroger, etc.

Many of the brands we acquire will be true "household names" with widespread awareness and great reputations. We have just signed a contract to buy our first four brands, and we will close (own) them in less than two months. For confidentiality reasons, we can't disclose the names of the brands right now, but each one is well-known and widely used.

Why did we choose the name "Blacksmith Brands"? As we see it, the brands we're acquiring are winners. However, as is the case in horseracing, all great champions occasionally need new shoes to be able to win the next race.

As our company will own several major brands, all of which will have their design projects of their own, this logo contest has the potential to lead much more work in the coming weeks and months.

This logo will appear on all business-to-business communication for the company (biz cards, sales presentations, stationery, financial communications, etc.).

In addition it will be a key element in our yet-to-be-designed web site which will talk about the company in general and will have detailed pages on each of our products. If we like the logo enough, it could also appear, in a relatively small size, on all our packages. The target audience for this logo is both business partners (suppliers, customers, financing sources, etc.) but also consumers who will be the ultimate key to our success.

This company will be similar in nature to Prestige Brands -- http://www.prestigebrands.com/ -- another company founded by our management team. Examples of a couple other consumer products companies with the sort of iconic logo that we're aiming for include Church & Dwight (the forearm and sledgehammer logo) and Clorox.

Logo requirements:
• Simple, memorable and does not need to be (but could be) explicitly linked to a "blacksmith" visual (forge, mallet, anvil, etc)
• It should work in both black & white and color
• Scalable, so that it can be used in a small size (e.g. on the side of packaging, business cards) and large size (on the company website)
• Available as vector graphics
• Clear, bold typography