Destination by Design was tasked with building a tourism brand from the ground up — a name, a visual identity, and a voice that could represent the county as a whole. The process began with regional analysis, audience research, and direct input from residents.
Visual
Identity
Mitchell County had never had a unified tourism identity. Bakersville, the county seat, and Spruce Pine, its largest town, each carry their own character. The discovery process combined regional analysis, audience insights, and extensive community input to find the throughline: a place shaped by mountains, alive with creativity, and unpolished in the coolest way.
Real. Mtn. Folk.
The tagline distills the brand into three words: Real. Mountain. Folk. It reflects Mitchell County’s Appalachian character, its close-knit towns, and its connection to the land without embellishment.
DbD partnered with Mitchell County, NC to build the Discover Mitchell County, NC tourism brand from the ground up, combining regional analysis, audience research, and direct community input into a single cohesive identity. The result centers on the tagline “Real. Mtn. Folk.” and a fiddle-playing bear mark, backed by a flexible logo system, a custom icon library, and a dedicated festival brand for event use. The identity now covers everything from wayfinding signage to seasonal merchandise across the county’s towns, including Bakersville and Spruce Pine.
Tourism branding and destination marketing work together to give a region a consistent identity and a reason for visitors to choose it over the next county over. Branding establishes the name, voice, and visual system; destination marketing puts that system to work across campaigns, partner materials, and seasonal promotion. For Mitchell County, that meant a brand strategy grounded in the region’s real strengths — its arts community, its mountain landscapes, and its small towns — built to support the tourism marketing that follows.
In small mountain counties, tourism branding is rarely just about visitors — it’s an economic development tool. A cohesive identity gives local businesses, festivals, and partner organizations a shared visual language to rally around, strengthening the case for outside investment and making the county’s assets legible to people who’ve never been there. For Mitchell County, that meant building a brand system flexible enough for the Tourism Development Authority, local galleries, and festival organizers to all use consistently, reinforcing the same identity every time.
Destination marketing is the practice of promoting a place — a county, town, or region — to attract visitors, investment, and new residents. It typically includes brand strategy, visual identity development, campaign creative, and the ongoing content and advertising that puts a place in front of the right audience. For Discover Mitchell County, NC, that meant establishing the brand foundation first: a name, a tagline, a logo system, and a set of guidelines the County and its partners can build campaigns on for years to come.
Mitchell County sits in the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina, bordering Tennessee and roughly 50 miles northeast of Asheville. Its county seat, Bakersville, is known as the gateway to Roan Mountain and its rhododendron balds, while Spruce Pine, the county’s largest town, has long been called the “Mineral City of the World” for its gem and mica mining history. The Penland School of Craft, one of the country’s oldest and largest craft schools, calls Mitchell County home — a fitting anchor for a brand built around creativity born from the land.
