The Royal Collection Trust is responsible for the care and preservation of the Royal Collection and its presentation to the public. As one of the largest and most significant art collections in the world, the Royal Collection comprises over one million objects, including paintings, works on paper, photographs and decorative arts such as furniture, jewellery, and tapestries. Spanning some fifteen royal residences and former residences across the UK, the collection is held in trust by the reigning monarch on behalf of the nation and its future sovereigns.

The Trust also manages the public opening of several royal sites, including Buckingham Palace (with The King’s Gallery and The Royal Mews), London sites such as St James’s Palace and Clarence House, Windsor Castle, and the Palace of Holyroodhouse (including The King’s Gallery). It oversees ten retail shops across Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle, and the Palace of Holyroodhouse, each offering a carefully curated selection of gifts designed to appeal to the palaces’ many visitors.

Pentagram was commissioned to create a comprehensive retail style guide that would enable teams across the Trust’s retail operations to deliver sector-leading own-label products. This involved developing a new design system rooted in existing brand assets and further evolved by Pentagram, and stress-testing the designs across current Royal Collection Trust products before adding them to the new guidelines.

Pentagram identified an opportunity to refresh and refine the Trust’s retail brand architecture. The result was a series of distinctive sub-brands that could stand alone while remaining connected by an overarching visual and verbal cohesion. The style guide was built to streamline the product creation process, introducing greater flexibility and agility across the entire retail offering.

An initial product audit revealed that the existing visual system was overly restrictive: the two-colour palette assigned per site was proving difficult to implement and was not consistently applied. As a result, products across sites looked disconnected and a proliferation of different logos had diluted brand recognition. 

In response, Pentagram proposed a focused strategy centred around the three flagship locations—Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle, and the Palace of Holyroodhouse—as the core of the retail brand. The team defined a strategic approach for the existing ‘The Palace Collection’, positioning the Trust’s in-house product line alongside the three locations, and creating an elegant bespoke colour palette.

Alongside this, the team created a strategic approach for the existing ‘The Palace Collection’ brand to elevate the Trust’s in-house product line. This collection celebrates the unique appeal of the Royal Collection itself and creates opportunities for products to be sold across multiple sites.

The new style guide provides a simplified and flexible retail brand architecture, including a comprehensive verbal identity, guidance on illustration and typography, new colour palettes, and a robust layout system. Each of the three sites, along with ‘The Palace Collection’, was given its own extended palette, blending sophisticated dark tones with energetic pops of colour to create a system that feels both regal and contemporary. The framework adapts easily across standard and premium ranges, enabling each product to feel distinct yet unmistakably part of the Royal Collection Trust family.

As part of the project, detailed labelling guidance and a verbal identity framework were developed. Built around a set of language principles, the framework strengthens copy, promotes consistency and ensures that the Trust’s voice is expressed with warmth, clarity and a quiet authority. The team mapped this verbal identity and how this tone fits within the broader Royal Collection ecosystem.

The project was a rare opportunity for Pentagram to collaborate with the Royal Collection Trust, an organisation that protects and presents one of the world’s most significant cultural assets. The team reimagined the Trust’s retail brand architecture from the ground up, creating a cohesive design system and verbal identity, introducing curated sub-brands and ‘The Palace Collection‘, and developing clear visual and language guidelines. The result is a flexible, future-ready framework that honours the collection’s heritage while enabling the creation of distinctive, high-quality products that resonate with today’s audiences and strengthen the Trust’s retail presence across its iconic sites.