I was brought onto the team at Bolin Zweig to help them name and brand three new CBD lines, all produced by our client Leafline Labs. Each brand would sit in its own pricing tier: lower-end, middle-priced, and luxury.
Our strategy was to create an everyday brand for convenience store shoppers at the lower price end, an active brand for the yoga studio/great outdoors/gym crowd in the middle tier, and a high-end brand for fashion-forward folks in the luxury tier.
I love naming brands, but I admit it’s always a tough gig! You have to say goodbye to many beloved options due to legal reasons and subjective stakeholders. After rounds and rounds of ideation, feedback, and copyright database searches, we landed on three names: Happy Place, SOAR, and Bonâme. Next, the team moved onto logo design, brand development, mission/vision/value writing, website creation, and introductory campaign work.Â
It was a lot of really cool work. Here, I will focus on SOAR.
Brand Building Blocks
VISION
A life untethered.
MISSION
To make high-performing hemp products for active adventurers—so they can push further and soar higher.
VALUES
Performance: No one ever starts out soaring. As a brand, we’re honest about our abilities with ourselves and the world. We stay hungry, setting steady, attainable goals to make sure that we’re always striving, and always inspiring.
Movement: Our bodies are at their best when in motion. And whether its slow and steady, or full-on soaring, we’re at home when we’re looking, thinking, and moving ahead.
Health: You get out what you put in, especially when it comes to your body. In a world where we’re bombarded with unhealthy temptations at every turn, we aim to make being healthy an easy choice.
Sustainability: Making cool stuff often comes at a cost to the planet. We don’t see minimizing the impact that our brand has on the environment as an option. It’s a duty.
Balance: Work and rest are the ultimate yin and yang of life. You can’t succeed at one without the other. Striking a healthy balance is the key to optimizing success.
Euphoria: An active life is a blissful one. It’s the deep-seeded “why” of life’s activity. We live to help people chase their bliss, and celebrate when they find it.
TONE
SOAR sounds like a big, healthy gust of wind. It’s natural, moving, peaceful, and powerful. It has no boundaries, stretching across every landscape.
Product Naming
I led the client’s team in a three-hour naming ideation marathon, which included an overview of some naming system examples from brands my team and I admired, a warm-up game, vocabulary generation exercises for each product, and a final brainstorming session.Â
It was a huge success! We all left the room that day with names and a system that we were happy with. Our big conference room was full of stickie notes, empty La Croix cans, and beaming clients. It was a great day, and we landed on an elegant naming system for SOAR. One that went on to inspire some future campaign work!
Campaign Concept – Elevate Everyday​​​​​​​
Campaign Concept – Know Thyself
Campaign Concept – Flow State
Where we landed (after some light client Frankensteining + pandemic pivots.)Â
Additional scripts:
Agency: Bolin
Copy: Me (Shan)
Design: Stephen Pappas
Creative Direction: Kris Growcott and Justin Zweig