Marou Chocolate introduced the Maison Marou sub-brand X Rice

In 2017, Saigon, Vietnam's Maison Marou opened as a cafe, patisserie, and gourmet chocolate factory. Marou's founders were able to completely express their vision thanks to the assistance of Rice Studios in developing the brand's image and designing the space, which allows them to do more than just sell packaged chocolate bars and introduce more people to the founders' expertise as gourmet chocolatiers.
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Maison Marou is a café, patisserie, and gourmet chocolate factory—an experience in cacao collecting adventure and gourmet chocolatier know-how. Maison Marou operates as a live kitchen allowing visitors to be involved in the testing of new products that may make their way into shelves world-wide. We developed a flexible identity system both spatially and graphically that would work dynamically across any size or shape of future MM, S, M, L, XL.

Maison Marou Case study

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The space has a fresh, adaptable collection of brand pieces. The brand's rougher side is conveyed through a rough graphic approach, while the bespoke script is influenced by vintage storefront lettering. The primary colors frame the well-known Marou chocolate bar spectrum, the origin range. The founders' signature "jungle shirts" provided an additional green emphasis, and Marou's flashy gold was a constant reminder of the brand's origins. To conclude, the logo serves as a extention for the Marou label.

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Maison Marou has branch in Calmette Street, in the centre of Saigon, in an Art Deco building that dates back to the 1930s. The hybridity and contrast created by the addition of the modern structure to the busy downtown area is striking. Slabs of plywood and marble refer to stacked bars, and vertical rectangular pieces are repeated as a grid for displaying chocolate bars in "the house that chocolate bars built," as it has become known. Each week, the chocolatiers at Maison Marou try their hand at making new varieties of chocolate bars, bon-bons, and pastries using ingredients and flavors from the local flavors. Because of this, Rice designed a menu with movable typography.

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