buttersticks
Creating a friendly, simple, natural brand that does what it says on the tin
It takes months to save enough to buy winter hardware, so why's it so hard to care for it, extend it’s lifetime and make environmentally-sound choices?
Why don’t we service our skis and snowboards?
Living in the UK without a car, as 22% of us do now, means taking your 6ft long prized-possession on public transport to visit a tuning shop. Paying £25-30, and as few shops work while-you-wait, heading home only to repeat the journey tomorrow.
That means a total journey time of 2-4hours, plus two public transport fares, minimum in London of £11.20 (but who can afford to line in zone 1 anyway....
Consumers Care
A 2020 McKinsey US consumer sentiment survey, more than 60 percent of respondents said they’d pay more for a product with sustainable packaging. A recent study by NielsenIQ found that 78 percent of US consumers say that a sustainable lifestyle is important to them.
Tuning Shops Don’t
Ski and snowboard waxes are made from petroleum and the byproducts of refining it. They contain hundreds of the forever chemicals given infamy by Mark Ruffalo in Dark Waters. Skiers and ski techs accumulate these chemicals in their blood, and tests have shown they’re often found with as much as 25 times the EU safe intake limit. When these waxes makes content with the snow, they diffuse, spreading their toxic ingredients throughout mountain ecosystems and run-off pretty much forever.
Creating the Brand
I wanted a name that made people think about what they put on their skis and snowboards in the same way they think about what they put in their bodies, that was also both friendly and widely relatable whilst echoing the cult dialects of seasonaires, parkrats and really regular skiers.
It was vital to create a pull for the most likely repeat customers whilst not alienating the broader market.
.png)
.png)
Butter in the UK has historically been marketed with the same recgonisable pseudo organic narrative. Love for land, love for cows, makes better butter.
And a similar visual language, of animals freely roaming bright green pastures on rolling hills, well away from any signs of humanity (or pollution).
Butter is also the name of a family of ski and snowboard tricks and it has lubricating properties.
It doesn’t take much imagination to leap from ‘skis’ to ‘sticks’ (there’s even a famous shop in the Alps called ‘Planks’).
The first skis, were in fact simple wooden blocks, and skiing used to be a much more ‘organic’ past-time, without powered chairlifts or giant tanks raking the slopes.
The idea of harking back to the past to find natural solutions to modern problems derived from the fossil fuel industry in wildly popular in the studies of intersectional environmentalism and in the narratives of indigenous and first nations peoples that are increasingly popular.
We also tested an alternate name with consumers - “Phat Joey’s” - we liked the vision of an old school garage that fixed up vintage cars and hot rods and it’s jovial hospitable owner - yours truly! But it seems like Joey watches way more old movies than everybody else because it wasn't loved during panels.
Brand Mark
There were a few goals for the brand mark:
Creating a feeling of nostalgia or oasen: adventures, time spent making memories with friends
- Creating a feeling of nostalgia or oasen: adventures, time spent making memories with friends
- Friendly, and in fact playful
- Circular (regenerative and eco-conscious)
- Include the location (convenience is key to of the offering)
- As a new service, it has to be obvious
.png)
Shape
We encased in a fine-outlined box, with our post code root overset, to emulate vintage signage specifically of London road signs.
Hero Font
We chose a font with a very heavy weight and near-to-true circular letterforms, paired with an extreme reduction of the letter spacing and lowercase to create an almost cartoonish effect to exaggerate this.
Secondary Font
We juxtaposed the phat brand hero font with a very contrasting font, set below and narrower, to emulate the vintage signage common of stereotypical nostalgia videos of road trips, travel time lapses and shops found in small towns of old school ski resorts. However, it was vital that this font also used circular letterforms whilst everything else was in face different, because the environment is central to every decision we make.
Whitespace
This font was paired with a very wide letter spacing to create exaggerated whitespace, typically used to create sophistication or elegance but in this case, as we’re offering a high quality service, to counter the playfulness with a feeling of deliberateness and thoughtful expert execution.
.png)
Colour
We went with beige. It’s been cool and contemporary since Kanye West started making Yeezys. Where we spent our time was settling on the exact colour.
Primarily balancing two goals, we wanted a colour pale enough to carry use our use of whitespace and we wanted a very natural, earthy tone, we wanted to really remind people that our products come from the ground and can be entirely returned to the ground.
Sound
We wanted something exciting that mirrors the feeling we get when we’re planning a trip - as that's the moment prospective buyers will think 'my skis need a tune', and we took a little inspiration from the famous Street festival hosted in Meribel by Planks, Grassroots, an incredibly popular community event, and the hip hop hype tracks used by the Chicago Bulls in their romp - Burton, the leading snowboard brand (they actually invented the sport) are huge Boston Celtics fans and we thought this a fun way to say we’re not just doing what everybody else does.
We choose a sample from Jurassic 5's ‘red hot’ for our brand outro on videos.
.png)
Visual Design
In a product servicing business, you’re defined by your quality. So our site is designed around using products we’ve serviced and the environemnt we’re seeking to protect as our central assets, combining that imagery with clean whitespaces, fine lines and sharp edges - just like our work.
Competing servicing are booked [over 90%] either by showing up to the shop, or by phone only. However, 50% of buyers now want to buy without speaking to a person. We foucused on creating a journey so that now, an overwhelming majority of customers book using the mobile site, found via. Instagram, or sponsored Ads on google via specialised landing pages, so we prioritised creating a simple layout that didn’t waste time with a story we’ve already told through our social media.
The site does exactly what the brand says on the tin. Friendly, simple, natural.
.gif)
.png)
