To survive, a city themed merchandise store needs to both scale and compete.
Repositioning the brand will allow the business to sell more and transcend competitors. Focusing the Owner’s time on growth and management instead of design will allow them to scale their business.
A city themed merchandise store was struggling to both scale and compete. The brand awareness of the store was low. They were competing against other established businesses also selling merchandise with their same city as the theme. The business Owner’s management and growth time was consumed with creating the merch they were selling.
The Owners thought they needed a new ad campaign. What benefited them was re-positioning their brand in the marketplace, building a community, and focusing their time.
Over the course of our brand strategy sessions certain imagery kept recurring. This imagery would become the directions for the new Hometown Goods identity. We were looking for common denominators that linked people to their hometowns without being specific to one city. Our previous positioning evaluation showed that representing one city was a saturated market Hometown couldn’t own. However, by representing multiple cities the new Hometown Goods could be more successful. The recurring imagry was; Period advertisments, Water towers, & Local Sports.
With the above three directions we got to work coming up with sketches to represent each of the directions.
Luxury Brand option
Your Watertower
Ad inspired typography
During the process of coming up with logo options to represent the new Hometown Goods the sports direction was dropped in favor of a more luxury brand direction to compare against the other two directions utalizing a watertower, or period advertising creative.
In the end the third option reflecting period ad inspired type was selected. We felt its bespoke nature conveyed the brands value of craft and had the air of personalization. These were desired since the brand strategy sessions revealed that the Hometown brand would be seeking crowd sourced, custom designs and pairing them with quality materials done in limited runs.
Chosen logo along with supporting labels and icons.
Looking back at the imagry inspiration pictures many of the colors were weathered versions of red, white, and blues. Therefore we chose these as the brand colors.
Limited runs of certain designs would be done. So it was important to label both the collection name they belonged to as well as the number of the item in the collection so that viewers could see the bespoke item they were getting.
Many delivery boxes are blue brown, or white. In an effort to stand out, we went with red boxes. It's easy to tell you've gotten a Hometown box.
The name of the store is being changed to Hometown Goods. This allows the Owners to not just sell merch centered around one city, but to broaden their customer base, and transcend their competition by selling merch with any number of specific city themes. Now they could sell merch with a Chicago, Kansas City, Denver, or Los Angeles theme. The store is being updated so that customers can search by city, region, or item. Online ads can be targeted to the area you are in, so you see your city’s merch. This repositioning allows Hometown Goods to both compete and scale.
After repositioning the brand, it was key for the Business Owners to focus their time on growth, and management. Others could design products, but only the Owners could grow and manage the business. To achieve this time re-allocation, we decided to create an online community of design contributors whose submissions, if selected, would quickly increase the stores offerings. This had a second impact on the business of driving traffic to it. Contributors would tell their followers about their submissions and each contributor influenced group would come to the online store to see if their submission was selected. During that time, they would see other items as well. This allowed Hometown Goods to grow in multiple spaces simultaneously.
The impact of these changes is still being measured, but total revenue increase of the business is projected at 143% over the next quarter from the previous quarter.
