How to modernize a heritage brand without losing its soul

June 2026

Modernizing a heritage brand really comes down to one uncomfortable decision: what you keep, and what you let go. Get that right and the rest is mostly execution. Get it wrong and you've either frozen the brand in amber or scrubbed off the reason anyone liked it in the first place. No pressure.

The Netherlands is full of these brands. Vocking has been making leverworst in Utrecht for over 135 years. Verstegen has been in our kitchen cupboards for more than a century. Boska has been making cheese tools since somewhere in the 1800s. You can't buy what they have. It's time, basically. People grew up with this stuff and that sticks.

Which is also exactly why touching them is terrifying. The second you change anything, someone is going to tell you you've ripped the soul out of it. We get it. We feel a bit of it ourselves every single time. But sitting still isn't the safe option here, it's just a slower way to fade out.

The thing we see go wrong most is brands deciding that modern means young. So they reach for a fresher logo and a louder colour and a tone of voice that suddenly wants to be twenty and hang out at festivals. And now the brand is basically cosplaying as someone else, and the people who trusted it for forty years have no idea who they're looking at. Young and modern aren't the same thing. You can be very modern and still act your age.

So before anyone opens Illustrator, we'd ask one boring question. What here is actually the heritage, and what is just stuff that's always been done? Those two get mixed up constantly. The heritage is the recipe, the craft, the reason the brand was ever worth making. The "always done it this way" is the beige label and the sad stock photo nobody has properly looked at since 2009. One of those you guard with your life. The other one you're allowed to bin.

With Echte Boter that line got very real. About as Dutch a product as you can find, with a story that was already sitting there waiting. Nobody needed us to invent anything. We needed to show it in a way that made a younger generation clock it again, without the people who already loved it feeling like we'd redecorated their childhood. That's the tightrope.

Here's the part nobody really tells you though. The history is the best material you've got. A hundred-year-old brand is sitting on archives and old packaging and weird forgotten claims and stories, and a lot of it is honestly better than anything we'd cook up from scratch in a meeting room. Half the job is just digging backwards and dragging the good bits forward..

And you don't have to shout to pull it off. If anything we'd do the opposite. Everyone's feed is already wall to wall with brands trying way too hard to be fast and funny and friend-shaped. A brand that just sits there, quietly sure of itself, not chasing the trend of the week, somehow ends up looking like the boldest one in the room. Funny how that works.

So. Modernizing your heritage brand. Don't start at the logo. Start at the one thing you'd flat out refuse to lose. Once you actually know what that is, you finally know what's safe to touch. Everything after that is just doing the work.

Which is the kind of job we like most, if we're honest. A brand with proper history, a new generation to win round, and enough trust to do it carefully. Got one of those? Or stuck halfway through one already? Come talk to us.