Kempinski Lifestyle

The brief

Kempinski Lifestyle is the membership club of Kempinski Hotel Suzhou - a lake-side hotel in Suzhou Industrial Park, and the piece of Kempinski’s Chinese portfolio this programme was built for.

The membership bundles dining, accommodation and Yang Spa with a book of gift certificates, which is a lot of different promises to make legible on one wallet-sized object, in two languages.

What I did

The whole package as a branded system: the identity and its lockup, the wallet inside and out, two card tiers, the certificate pocket, the colour palette, and the print production behind all of it.

Every surface runs English and simplified Chinese together rather than as a translation layer - the two scripts share the grid, and neither reads as the afterthought.

The system

The identity leans on a single device: an engraved peony, drawn as a fine gold line over Kempinski’s navy. It scales from a full wallet cover down to the corner of a credit-card-sized piece of plastic, which is the only real test a hospitality mark has to pass.

Two tiers, distinguished by ground rather than by ornament - navy for one, taupe-gold for the other - so the hierarchy is obvious at a glance across a restaurant table without the lower tier looking like a lesser object.

The website

The club’s site at kempinskilifestyle.com carried the same system online - the peony, the navy, the two languages - and gave a prospective member somewhere to read the privileges before committing to a year of them.

Outcome

Kempinski Lifestyle shipped as a complete membership package for the Suzhou hotel - identity, wallet, two card tiers, certificates and the site behind them.

It sits alongside the St. Regis, W and IHG programmes here as the same job for a fifth hotel group, in a fourth market and a second writing system.