Winter Wonderland

Bed-Stuy Gateway BID’s Winter Wonderland is an annual holiday market and festive event held at Marcy Plaza in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. The event aims to support local small businesses, creatives, and community organizations, offering a unique shopping experience and holiday festivities.

Winter Wonderland debuted in 2020 as a pilot event, hosting an outdoor, socially-distanced market to support Bed-Stuy’s local businesses during the pandemic. Since then, it has grown into a premier holiday destination, with new additions such as market stalls, branding strategies, and storytelling videos.

The Bed-Stuy Gateway BID aims to continue growing Winter Wonderland into a beloved annual tradition, leveraging its design interventions and marketing strategies to increase partnerships and expand its presence throughout Brooklyn.

The entire visual identity was crafted by the New York-based design studio Gretel:

Through the Neighborhoods Now initiative, Gretel partnered with Bed-Stuy’s community leaders to bring Winter Wonderland to life through a joyful visual identity that celebrates Bed-Stuy’s vibrant culture and history while wrapping the neighborhood with holiday cheer. […] At the heart of the Winter Wonderland look & feel is a pair of dynamic “Ws” set in Esselte Letraset’s iconic typeface Lazybones. The letterforms fluidly transform to become inclusive and approachable, reconfiguring and combining into various holiday decorations, from snowflakes, christmas trees, menorahs, to patterns that wrap the neighborhood with holiday spirit.

The project features Radion A by General Type Studio as the primary typeface for both display and body copy. Radion A is an interpretation of the late 1920s Rudolf Koch’s Kabel but is even more connected to the warmth of the 1970s and the popular ITC Kabel version for a contemporary eye.