MODERN CREATIVITY
ASHLEY HOLDEN HAMMOND
GRIT FITNESS
Laura Kahn, coach and certified personal trainer from Northern New Jersey, had a dream of launching her own company and fitness brand. Working for Universities and private gyms, Laura had built a loyal client base over the last 15+ years. Refocusing her career path after the fitness industry as a whole took a hard hit during the 2020 pandemic, she decided to venture out on her own.
THE CHALLENGE
Create a brand identity and develop a website with a shopping cart option to match the full-throttle, high intensity feel of this hard working brand to increase the visibility of GRIT Fitness and its services, in-home and virtually.
WITH A GREAT STRATEGY ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE
To add an extra layer of difficulty to this challenge, the client was pregnant with her second child. Expecting the baby to arrive within 3 months of our initial conversation, created a tight working deadline. This also meant that she would need the recorded fitness classes (usually live) to be sold as digital products to help generate income while she was on maternity leave.
THE OUTCOME
A tough but fitting logo was developed for GRIT and a website development plan was put in place to support GRIT Fitness as an authoritative and authentic leader in full body fitness programs, specializing in Training On-Demand classes. Positioned as the best option to help you workout anytime, from anywhere, the On-Demand classes allow for easy purchases and simple, direct downloads of over 50 specialized workouts.
DEFINING THE BRAND
Brand definition creates an objective filter that GRIT Fitness will be able to run all future decisions through to keep the brand consistent. By checking against this statement, we can quickly see whether any decisions will help or hurt, focus or muddy, purify or modify the brand.
An in-depth strategy session was conducted remotely using a combination curated imagery, charts, graphs and statements. A clear brand story and voice began to emerged for GRIT. We helped to tailor and define these elements using a custom 25+ questionnaire to focus on the true brand attributes.
STYLESCAPE SQUAT, REP + REPEAT
Creating a stylescape to express and steer the visual language for a project allows the client to get a feel for how the website will be developed. The stylescape included fonts selection, proposed brand colors and images, artfully and intentionally arranged.
Direction for the stylescape came from the initial client meeting combined with additional industry and competitor research.
We provided this client with two similar but very different stylescapes to help them visualize their new brand in multiple ways while keeping the business goals in mind. Ultimately the design below incorporated the right look and feel for GRIT.
A CURATED "ABOUT US" STATEMENT
Using the brand attributes as defined in an earlier strategy session, we worked with our client to develop this custom about statement of all of the GRIT Fitness capabilities.
"GRIT Fitness believes in challenging the status quo of what it means to be an athlete. We strive to enhance the success of all our clients by providing custom fitness solutions through personal training, nutrition coaching, live online classes, running programs, and professional on-demand training sessions, to fit your busy schedule. "
LOGO SUITE
WEB DEVELOPMENT
CRAFTING THE STORY
Creating an authentic brand story can help improve trust, but the story must be driven through personality. GRIT's story, like many others, was inspired by the presence of people who participate, create, connect, and develop the saga of growth and success.
Personality drives the story. But the story isn’t a resume or life history of an individual. It’s the evolution of an entity told with personality. People trust other people. The core reason why your story should be personality-driven is so that it will provide someone real for customers to trust.
OPEN UP SHOP
One of the ecommerce benefits is that it has a lower startup cost. Physical retail stores have to pay up to thousands of dollars to rent one of their store locations. They also have several upfront costs such as store signs, store design, buying inventory, sales equipment, and more. Physical retail stores also have to pay staff to work and run each location.
Ecommerce online stores are always open for business. By being available at all hours, you can attract people who would normally pick up a product in stores, if the store were open. Consider your audience and how they could potentially benefit from being able to purchase your product or service online.
For GRIT Fitness it was essential that the platform have an online purchasing option. We set up the Training On-Demand workouts as an automated ordering system so that customers receive a confirmation email when they place an order and can download their recently purchased workout anywhere, anytime.
One of the best ecommerce advantages is that you can easily gain access to data for analysis on your customer. Most people feel uncomfortable giving away email addresses or postal codes to physical retailers. Obtaining your customer’s name, mailing address, e-mail address, and phone number means you have at least three different ways to communicate and build a relationship with them.
EVOLVING NATURE OF A BRAND
A brand is not static, it evolves based on the maturity of a business, products, services and target markets. We see the potential of a brand and cannot help but want to be involved in evolving the brand to further solidify what it stands for based on how the business is evolving and where the business is winning.
Developing the brand helps us to then develop the brands position and identity. When clients enquire about brand development, they often want someone to develop a visual identity (such as the logo).
Not following the brand development process means that there is a good chance that the visual identity simply will not hit the mark. It’s kinda like playing competitive a sport without training. You can still play the game, but you won’t be consistently winning or even competitive.
Stay tuned as there is always more to come in the evolution of the GRIT Fitness brand visual identity and social media marketing.