What do your shopping carts and baskets do for your business? Obviously, these vessels provide your customers with convenient means of transporting the various items they grab from the shelf. Upon closer inspection, however, you’ll realize that your baskets and carts also have implications for your business’ branding. Treating your customers well is paramount to establishing and maintaining a positive brand, but this is far from the only way to solidify a strong identity — the best brands are instantly recognizable, featuring distinct colors and logos that drive home your company’s unique character. 

Virtually every element of your business should contribute to this brand coherence, including your carts and baskets. After all, most of your customers will quickly cling to these vessels upon entering your establishment, making them the perfect instruments for some brand reinforcement. But how exactly do you ensure that your carts and baskets are “on-brand” for your store and business at large? 

How to Make Your Baskets Match Your Brand

Color Cohesion

As mentioned above, thoughtful color schemes are integral to creating a memorable brand. A bold color palette acts like a stamp that imprints itself in the minds of your audience, reminding them of your business before they even make out a name or logo. Not every surface or feature within your store needs to don the team colors of your business, but key features should accurately represent these colors for greater brand cohesion, including your shopping carts and baskets. Indeed, accuracy is key — you want to provide an exact color match for your custom shopping baskets and carts for the best effect. Even small discrepancies in this department can become eyesores and ultimately reduce just how on-brand these vessels are. As such, work with a shopping cart/basket manufacturer that offers a color match guarantee.

Boast Your Logo on Your Baskets and Carts

Your business’ color palette might be its most recognizable branding trait, but its logo is undoubtedly a close second (especially when you consider the fact that multiple businesses will share similar color schemes). If you want to make sure your carts and baskets stay on-brand, then it helps to place your logo on them, ideally in a visible location. Better yet, try to post your business’ name and/or logo on multiple sides of your shopping vessels, ensuring that said logo can be seen even when the vessels are nested inside each other for storage. In doing so, all customers will get a glimpse of your business’ logo at some point during their shopping journey. Even if they’re well aware of where they are, displaying your logo prominently and frequently further reinforces your brand. So, the larger and more defined these logos, the better. Note that bigger baskets and carts will offer more surface area for larger font types.

Make Them the Right Size for Your Store

Providing your carts and baskets with coherent colors and prominent logos goes a long way to keeping them in line with your brand. Still, there are more ways to ensure your shopping vessels remain the perfect fit for your business’ identity. The best shopping carts and baskets for your store are those that not only match its aesthetic but also correspond with its physical parameters. Put simply, your carts and baskets should be the proper shape and size for the amount of space you have in your location and for the types of products you sell. For instance, it’s not very on-brand for a small boutique shop to provide giant carts for its customers, as this will take up an inordinate amount of space and become impractical for most purchases. Instead, a smaller shop such as this should invest in smaller baskets. A large retailer, on the other hand, is often better off providing larger carts and baskets to accommodate the large items and quantities it typically sells.

Keep Them Visible

You can’t boost your brand if you don’t make it easy for your audience to see what you’re all about. If your shopping baskets and carts are hard to find and/or the logos pasted on them can’t easily be seen from a distance, these vessels might as well not don your branding at all. In other words, keeping your carts and baskets visible is essential to taking advantage of their promotional capabilities. So, be smart about where you place them, how you store them, and where your business’ logo is placed on each vessel.

Keep Them Clean

Maintaining a clean storefront is essential for propping up your brand reputation. You’ll want to make sure your store’s floors, countertops, shelves, and other surfaces are cleaned on a regular basis — the same goes for your carts and baskets. Indeed, keeping your shopping vessels clean is paramount, considering how often they’re used by various customers throughout the day. Beyond these health and safety concerns, though, maintaining clean carts and baskets will prevent their colors from fading, keep their logos bright and visible, and overall send the right message to your audience.

Purchase New Shopping Carts and Baskets When Rebranding

The time may come when your business needs to change up its branding in some way. If these changes involve new logos and/or color schemes, don’t leave your baskets and carts in the past — instead, you’ll likely need to invest in new vessels complete with your business’ fresh look to replace your old fleet. Otherwise, you’ll face a disconnect between your shopping vessels and the rest of your location, confusing customers and harming your brand recognition.

Good L Corporation delivers innovative shopping cart and basket solutions for retailers on a global scale. Good L Corp. can configure the right carryall strategy to boost your retail business, from a fleet of new custom carts to launch your store opening to replacement baskets that supplement your existing shop supply. Let’s get started! Contact us today for a no-pressure sales quote!