17 February 2026

House of Croissants Bet Everything on One Product. That's Why It Works.

How Rare Ideas built a brand by saying no to everything else but Croissants

Most food brands want to be everything. House of Croissants decided to be one thing really, really well. The team at Rare Ideas started with a question most brands are afraid to ask: what will we not do? No long menu. No identity crisis. Just croissants, every day, done right. And we think that's actually the harder brief because when the menu is this short, every single decision carries more weight. There's nowhere to hide.

Most food brands want to be everything. House of Croissants decided to be one thing really, really well. The team at Rare Ideas started with a question most brands are afraid to ask: what will we not do? No long menu. No identity crisis. Just croissants, every day, done right. And we think that's actually the harder brief because when the menu is this short, every single decision carries more weight. There's nowhere to hide.

HOC's positioning was built around category ownership: be the first name that comes to mind when someone wants a croissant. Not a café that also does croissants. The croissant place. To get there, Rare Ideas used one shape - drawn from the croissant itself - and ran it through everything. Menus, packaging, signage, the space. Less as decoration, but as repetition that builds memory. This is something we find underrated in brand work: recall is built through consistency, not cleverness. When people see the same form everywhere, the more you remember it. That's the whole trick.

Image Courtesy Rare Ideas

Image Courtesy Rare Ideas

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