February 15, 2016

Building a Lifestyle: How Shea takes branding beyond a single store

Some clients work with Shea to create a singular location or brand. But as lifestyle brands continue to grow in droves (think: lululemon, Anthropologie), more and more clients are looking to sell an overall lifestyle—and that’s exactly when Shea steps in to help.

Bring on the juice. Rita Katona wanted to bring a new brand to the Twin Cities highlighting cold-press juices. But Katona thinks big, and she wasn’t just looking to open a store on the corner. “The idea was always much bigger than a juice bar. We were starting a better-for-you food and beverage company, and we knew that the first project we wanted to launch was cold-pressed juice. So the retail side was always known as something that would be one part of a much larger business,” she explains.

Bringing those components together is what Shea does best, so we took on the project full-force. We worked with Katona and her team to create a company name and logo that expressed the brand’s hip energy and mission to inspire healthy living (learn more about our naming process and logo evolution here), then put that branding philosophy into motion.

The friendly, approachable branding, which emphasizes bright colors, good-for-you habits, and love in every bottle, is key to Juice So Good’s overall business strategy. “We wanted to make sure people knew that juicing isn’t just something that supermodels or really hardcore fit people are into,” says Katona. “We wanted to make this something people could embrace in their everyday lives regardless of their age or fitness level.”

Like Katona, we knew from the start that a retail location for the juice bar was just the beginning. We needed to come up with branding elements that would translate easily from a retail space to the juice packaging itself to coolers in markets and fitness studios.

So our presentations to the client gave a full look at what Juice So Good could be—strategic research, dozens of logo options using different potential names, mockups of how the company’s social-media sites could look, renderings of the retail space, merchandising plans for other locations, inspiration images for the décor, T-shirt designs for employees, and so much more. “Shea showed early on that they understood all the different customer touchpoints we wanted to have,” says Katona. “The team knew how to take branding elements and push them across different channels in a way that would resonate with the consumer and help build that continuity in the brand, and then build a community around it.”

One of those touchpoints? A mobile juice truck.

“The truck was actually Shea’s idea,” says Katona. “It was in one of their presentations, and we loved the idea.” Giving Minneapolites a way to get their juice fix on the go not only made the Juice So Good name hot on the streets, it also helped promote the flexible healthy lifestyle that the company espouses.

The branding values and consistency were key in helping Juice So Good develop into a full-fledged national lifestyle brand, with a presence in grocery stores and fitness studios as well as its retail café, a philanthropic platform called Do So Good, and plans to expand further. The Shea-created style guide and brand design guidelines allow Katona’s team to create brand-specific promotional materials that can be distributed across the country and online, and can be shipped out nationally along with the company’s juice boxes.

As Juice So Good expands, the branding elements that Shea set in place will continue to build consistency and a loyal consumer base. And we’re not going anywhere—we’ll be there to help as the company continues its quest to become a full-fledged lifestyle brand.

Because we never stop caring about our clients.

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