Description:

Colour Mill is an Australia-based, market-leading food colouring brand. Tired of subpar products and a predictably dull range of colours, they decided it was time to shake things up, and created a range of pigments, not dyes, which achieve unmatched creative results for their incredibly dedicated, cake-making and baking customer base.

The cake-making and baking community is vivid and vibrant. They’re dedicated to delightful creations, rich in colour and joy, and yet the majority of the brands providing their colouring products are dull and uninspiring. Wanting to set themselves apart from the standard, they needed an identity do-over that would express what they’ve got to offer — premium, playful and kaleidoscopic colour.

It made sense for the brand to reflect what its community creates, so it began with the idea of “colour play” — a concept that celebrates the joy, play, mess and finesse throughout the cake-decorating process, from the kitchen counter to baking tray to final touches. We wanted the brand system to be expressive, imaginative and flexible, allowing it to reflect the spectrum of baked goods — from sophisticated and elevated right through to sweet, sugary chaos.

Until now, Colour Mill had been borrowing imagery from their own online community and partners. They had no distinct style of their own and were mostly showing cakes piped to perfection. The thing is, Colour Mill is more than the end result — it’s the process.

With photographer Shelley Horan and stylist Jerrie-Joy Redman-Lloyd, we wanted to show it all — the piping bags, the cookie cutters, the almost-empty bowls of ganache scraped clean by greedy fingers. The shoot also shows how Colour Mill can be applied outside of just cakes. We corralled bakers, decorators and patissiers to concoct everything from cookies to cocktails, jelly and macarons. It was all hands on deck to deliver a mesmerising mess that’s no doubt familiar to the brand’s adoring fans.

This distinct style, and the celebration of creativity at its messiest, is what elevates Colour Mill's photography for its audience and the broader baking community.