Chapter 27
27
Elsie has always known what her life would bring. She was doing chores at the hardware store before she’d ever really thought about what she might want to be when she grew up. When Derrick proposed, it made sense. It was the next logical step. Live in Minneapolis, work at the store, settle down and have kids. The route was obvious.
Sitting with her back against the headboard of a twin bed, her computer on her lap, a blinking cursor in the address bar of a browser, nothing feels obvious. Where does she even start?
Store signage.
Logo design.
Rebranding.
She flips up the hood of her sweatshirt like it will protect her from the glut of choices. Her parents are at the store, her mom covering the register for her. The house is empty but for Elsie and the two cats. She can take her time.
Okay, so fuck taking her time. She started by rereading her notes from the marketing class she took years ago. From there, it’s been three hours of researching trends and suppliers and font choices, and she’d rather just close her eyes and click at random. Obviously she’s not going to do that—she can’t half-ass this now that she finally has the chance to do what’s best for the store. But there’s so much to consider. Why did she think she could do this?
Mumford, her parents’ single-brain-celled orange cat, chirps as he hops onto the bed next to her.
“Hey, pretty boy.”
He’s purring before she even reaches out a hand to offer pets.
“Maybe you’re right,” she says, scratching behind his ears. “I should take a break.”
Elsie wishes she could call Ginny. She needs to talk this through, and Ginny has always been her favorite sounding board. As she makes herself a cup of coffee in her parents’ kitchen, she supposes Mumford will have to do.
“It feels like I already forgot everything from school,” she tells the cat. “I mean, I know I did business administration and not marketing specifically, but there’s just a lot more than I had thought about. There are whole companies that specialize in this. But obviously that’s more than I can spend.”
Mumford twines around her legs.
“But also, like, I don’t need to hire an outside company to tell me what the store’s mission is, or how we want to be seen.”
Mumford chirps, and Elsie would love to think it was in agreement, but as he flops onto his back next to his food bowl, she knows he’s just trying to convince her to feed him second breakfast. She ignores him and flips open the coffee maker to switch out the pods. Her mom might be dense when it comes to the breakup, but Elsie can’t be too frustrated with her, given that as soon as Elsie moved in, her mom filled the cabinets with her favorite food. Elsie pours herself a bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch while her coffee brews.
Hoffman Hardware is never going to beat the big chains on selection, and often not on price, but they provide something better. As a small local business, a mom-and-pop shop, they actually care about their customers. Elsie is proud of their slogan, and her dad’s obsessed with it. Beginner Friendly, Expert Approved. Hoffman Hardware will offer the customer service they need, whether they’re a pro or they have no idea what they’re doing.
Working the register for so many years, Elsie knows their customers. David, the contractor her dad calls Big Guy, who is no-nonsense about his professional projects but will gush for as long as you’ll let him when he’s building something for his family. King, who built a she shed in their backyard for their wife to have space to knit. They’re still trying to convince her to sell her stuff on Etsy. Rolf has been updating his house for the past two years, a new project every few months. Twins Amalie and Adele come in with their mom, Sophia, to pick out presents for their dad every birthday, Father’s Day, Christmas, and sometimes just because.
Elsie grabs the yellow legal pad from next to the home phone her dad insists on having. It’s supposed to be for taking messages on, but given that everyone just calls cell phones, the last note, scribbled in her mom’s messy cursive, is pick up sufganiyot wednesday. Hanukkah was two months ago.
Elsie flips to a new page and writes HOFFMAN HARDWARE at the top. Beginner Friendly, Expert Approved. She finishes her cereal so it doesn’t get soggy, then sets a three-minute timer on her phone. For the next hundred and eighty seconds, she writes as many adjectives as she can to describe the store, its mission, values, whatever other buzzwords swam across her screen as she researched.
When the timer goes off, she’s covered the page. Some of it is generic enough to be meaningless— tools, hardware, DIY —then there’s the basics— small business, family-owned, local. Then there’s what makes Hoffman Hardware stand out.
Trustworthy. Dependable. Home.
This is where she’ll start.
They need a visual brand that reflects these. They need a more distinct visual brand in general. There’s the font, and the slogan, but no logo. No instantly identifiable design. That’s what Elsie’s going to do.
Not that she knows much about graphic design. All she has is what she absorbed while Ginny got their degree, plus the absurd amount of free templates online as a starting place. It’d be so much easier if she could ask Ginny. She could show them her list of words and they could talk things through, and Ginny could sketch up some logo ideas. It’d probably take twenty minutes.
But she’s giving Ginny whatever space they need. Even if Ginny said they could still be friends, Elsie doesn’t know how to be anything but all-in with them. And maybe if Elsie gives them enough space, they won’t need it for that long. She’s clinging to the hope that Ginny will change their mind. That at any moment now, they’ll call, and things can go back to normal.
So instead of texting Ginny wtf is color theory?, Elsie puts her dishes in the sink and gets back to work.
There are still enough options to be overwhelming, but she takes the decisions one by one and makes progress in stages.
Minimalism seems to be in style, but a sleek modern look would be such a departure from what they have now. Elsie wants a departure, but not a full disconnect. There are parts of the current look she’s going to keep. Like it or not, the navy blue is staying. She does add yellow. Not because it’s her favorite color, but because it looks good, and color theory says it makes people happy. The navy is trustworthy— an institution, like her dad says. Trustworthy and fun seem like good things for a logo to convey.
She tries all kinds of different logo templates and so many different fonts, eventually she’s not sure Hoffman and Hardware are words anymore.
According to her research, they need a visual element that isn’t text based. It’s not like Elsie’s going to come up with the Nike swoosh, but there needs to be something. Whatever she creates won’t even necessarily be the final logo. She just needs something to show her dad—a picture’s worth a thousand words, right? She needs him to actually see the potential in a refresh. They can hire a graphic designer to tighten up her design later. Maybe by the time they get to that, she can ask Ginny for help.
Elsie looks at the two H s. As much as she’d rather not think about Nazi sympathizer Coco Chanel, she ran across the double- C Chanel logo more than once in her research. Connecting the bottom of one H to the top of the other makes it look like a railroad track; connecting their sides looks a bit like a fence, which could be worse. She’s onto something.
It takes another hour of tinkering before she’s satisfied.
Two navy-blue H s, the bottom right of one forming the top left of the other, and a yellow caret sitting above the top H , like a roof. It’s a simple, identifiable element, and if Elsie squints, she can imagine it looks like a house with a deck attached. Plus, it scales easily into a full logo—add offman and ardware to each H . The main font is sans serif, but the cursive script is still there, Beginner Friendly, Expert Approved like a curved path underneath everything.
She’s probably been looking at it for too long to be objective, but whatever. She fucking loves it.
She texts a picture to Danielle.
Gonna sleep on it, but what do you think?
Before her sister can respond, Elsie notices the time.
“Fuck.”
She didn’t get the chicken out of the freezer to defrost. Her mom’s gonna kill her.