Candylab rebranded its retro toy cars to reach kids and ‘kidults’

When Vlad Drǎgușin founded his mid-century inspired toy car company, Candylab, in 2013, he had a Kickstarter page and a dream. His goal was to create wooden model cars inspired by hot rods and classic American car designs; toys that would be both durable enough for play and sleek enough for display. As it turns out, there’s a major growing market for that kind of thing—and Candylab just rebranded to capture it.

Since its founding, Candylab has secured retail placement in stores like London’s Design Museum, MoMa, the Guggenheim, Barnes & Noble, and the cult favorite apparel brand Kith. It’s also notched major brand collabs including with Saint Laurent, Zara Kids, Criterion Collection, The New York Times, and, most recently, Netflix’s Stranger Things.

In recent years, Candylab has expanded its product offerings into two categories: one is its original line of premium, heftier cars, designed with collectibility in mind, and the second is a new line of smaller, less expensive, more lightweight cars engineered for play. Candylab’s toys naturally fit into an increasingly bifurcated toy industry that, over the past few years, has begun targeting two different audiences: kids who want to play with toys, and adults who want to collect them (and maybe play a bit, too). 

The company’s issue, according to Johnny Selman, founder of the design agency Selman, was that Candylab’s branding didn’t draw a clear distinction between its core products, making it difficult for customers to understand its offerings. So, his team worked with Candylab to create a new logo, brand positioning, product names, and visual identity that streamline it for a future where toys are meant for every kind of customer.

What’s a ‘kidult,’ anyway?

Candylab’s products are a prime example of items beloved by a niche that some might refer to as the “kidult” segment, or an emerging consumer base of adults who are investing in toys of their own. 

According to a 2024 Circana report, adults accounted for more toy sales than preschoolers, with 43% purchasing a toy for themselves in the previous year. Companies like Lego and Mattel have increasingly begun tapping into this trend with new, nostalgia-driven items specifically designed for an adult audience. John Paul Chirdon, a creative director at Selman, says Drǎgușin’s goal has always been to make nice, design-forward toys for kids—and adults’ interest in the product naturally comes alongside that.

“As an adult, you don’t really punch down to make something attractive for kids, you just make something really good for kids,” Chirdon says. Selman’s challenge, then, was to design a brand architecture that was both “really awesome for kids and really premium for adults.”

Designing a new brand for Candylab

When Selman began brainstorming a new brand identity for Candylab, the core problem quickly became clear. Because the company had been built piece-by-piece over time by a small team, it was overflowing with great retro imagery and branding concepts, but lacked a consistent overarching brand story. Across some of the packaging, Johnny says, his team found at least six different versions of the Candylab logo. 

Selman streamlined the broader branding using past iterations of the Candylab logo—which themselves pulled inspiration from chrome typography on vintage cars—to create one retro-yet-legible wordmark that represents the company. From there, it also identified a core color palette for the brand and narrowed its font options to just one type family called Space Grotesk.

This simplification process opened the door for Selman to address the fact that, online, customers had trouble distinguishing between the brand’s more kid-centric line of cars (then called Candycars) and its more premium, adult-focused large cars (then called Midcentury Americana).

“Online, that branding didn’t exist,” Chirdon says. The Americana and Candycar lines weren’t visually distinguished from each other or the overarching Candylab brand, leaving consumers confused about the difference between all three. Ultimately, Chirdon adds, “we were like, ‘You’re one brand—Candylab. Now let’s deal with just making all the products clear.’”

Looking ahead to new kinds of cars

To start, the team decided to fully rename the premium car line “Mints,” while the smaller cars are still called “Candycars.” Now, though, the two lines look entirely distinct on shelves and online. 

Mints are universally displayed against an white background, both in packaging and digitally, to keep a cleaner look. Meanwhile, Candycars are packaged and edited onto colorful backgrounds in hues like pastel blue, tangerine, and teal. Mints and Candycars also have their own dedicated logos, each inspired by different eras of car typography.

“What we tried to do was push that a little more whimsical for the Candycar line and then push it a little bit more classic grown-up with the Mints line,” Johnny says.

Candylab’s new identity has already appeared online, and it will start rolling out on packaging as new cars debut over time. More importantly, Johnny and Chirdon say, this brand architecture means that Candylab can start introducing new product lines without confusing customers—like an accessory pack of toy roads called Roadworks and a fresh car design called Toons, both of which are part of Candylab’s current fundraiser on Kickstarter.

“We helped them create the platform to keep going with clarity,” Chirdon says.