Evolving 80 years of brand perception across print & digital
Timeline
12 Months
Role
Creative & Design Manager
Team
Marketing Director,
Creative & Design Manager (me)
Digital Marketing Manager
Social Media Manager
Web Developer
Division Operations Manager
TL:DR
This 80-year old brand wanted:
to separate their firearms division from usual business
to elevate its brand perception and competing on sophistication and professionalism in a highly-restricted industry
I solo-designed a new brand identity and led the pitch to leadership to design a new website. Once approved, I designed the MVP website in Figma, designed new printed sales enablement, and marketing materials. For launch, I creative-directed commercials and social media strategy, leading teams in multiple photo and video shoots.
Problem
How does one create a competitive sophisticated professional identity in the retail firearms market? How should we evolve 80 years of rustic local family-centered brand presence to that identity?
The client wanted:
a separate brand to limit liability without confusing current customer base
to be competitive with a new identity despite highly-restrictive regulation around firearms marketing
A reel 1
Brand Design
The branding of the parent company is an 80-year old family name currently held by its owners and operators, eliciting strong emotional opinions about evolving the brand. To mitigate leadership concerns about the derivative brand identity, I maintained the same color palette but changed the hierarchy of colors to better compete within the firearms industry. Similarly, only small logo changes were approved. However a new typeface was introduced to add depth to the current type system and create a feeling of familiarity for long-time customers by referencing the type in the iconic logo. I led meetings on branding with leadership, acknowledging concerns and rationalizing design decisions with assumed business impacts.
Branding intro new typeface
Product Design & Management
To be a competitive entrant into the firearms industry, I believed the company needed a new website. With analytics from the Digital Marketing Manager, I led multiple meetings to pitch an MVP site to leadership. When approved, I proposed a timeline using Jira, and led collaborative design sessions with the Marketing Director, Digital Design Manager, and Developer. I solo-designed the site on Figma before handoff to the Developer and Digital Media Manager.
Creative Direction for Commercials & Social Media
Leadership wanted focused campaigns on Meta platforms, which hold a significant amount of customers for the parent company, despite firearms being on Meta restricted goods list. I led 2 days of internal workshops to gather competitor research and identified 3 content strategies to test. The strategies highlighted the product features and encouraged viewers to click links for further information without violating Meta’s restrictions. I then directed a 6-hour on-site videoshoot to capture new content, and trained the Social Media Manager in editing the content for Meta platforms.
A reel
Reflections
The MVP site had a non-interactive gallery feature with truncated captions, which confused users (evident by heat-mapping). Though users expected the gallery images to open to a detail page (as typical from competitor sites), our team’s limited resources couldn’t deliver that feature in time. In the meantime, we put a character limit on captions to eliminate truncation, and added a lightbox functionality on clicked images. I would have liked to run user tests with customers before launch but due to a compressed timeline, only ran limited tests within the company.
