Project scope
Branding, Copywriting, Translation, Graphic Design, Website Design, eCommerce, Development & Support
Hotel Indigo is IHG’s upper upscale boutique hotel brand. Each Hotel Indigo takes its inspiration from the neighbourhood that it calls home. Opened in January 2020, Hotel Indigo Hakone Gora brings the best that the locale has to offer into the hotel and gives it a striking twist.
In the year before the hotel opened, IHG was undertaking a major repositioning of the Hotel Indigo brand and charged the team at Paradigm with writing, designing, and developing a new website based on this new brand’s visual identity and tone of voice. In fact, this was to be the first website in the world to have the new brand applied to it.
These unique boutique hotels are designed to capture the true spirit of the community they belong to and inspire curiosity in their guests, so the website also needed to reflect the spirit of the Hakone Gora neighborhood. The creative team at Paradigm made a number of trips to Hakone to meet with and interview some of the local artisans and merchants who would have an ongoing relationship with the hotel.
As this was the first time the new brand would be applied to a website, there was a particularly large group of stakeholders who needed to be involved in the process. Through Figma, one of the primary UI/UX design applications we use at Paradigm, we were able to easily share prototypes, make design presentations, and gather feedback, regardless of location.
With a sophisticated editorial look and feel being a key ingredient of the brand, delicate and sensitive typographic choices played a huge role in the final design. Paradigm also created a custom graphic pattern based on the yosegi-zaiku — traditional Japanese marquetry that the region is famous for — which has been used liberally throughout the hotel.
We created key positioning statements as well as copy for the entire site in English, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean. We also developed a custom booking form to seamlessly integrate with the IHG booking engine and added e-commerce functionality for visitors to purchase gifts.
“Paradigm were a great team to work with and really understood how we wanted to project our unique hotel brand into the market in Japan,” said Paul Tsuji, General Manager.
Paradigm were a great team to work with and really understood how we wanted to project our unique hotel brand into the market in Japan.
Paul Tsuji
General Manager
Hakone Gora Hotel Indigo
