Founded in Calgary, 1979, Westbeach started life as a surf brand; designing and selling boardshorts from a table in a mall.
That was until snowboarding hit the scene, when they headed West to Vancouver to become the first snowboard apparel brand to hit the mountains; and they have been sharing their passion for the mountains ever since.
Whilst others shifted their focus to hardware, Westbeach have always focused on outerwear, creating products for the early pioneers of yesteryears all the way through to the next generation of snowboarders.
Driven by their pioneering mind-set, they have consistently devoted themselves to progressing riding styles, paving the way for new event formats and shaping snowboarding culture. Fuelled by united and passionate individuals, this ideal lives on today through a lifetime of dedication.
The Challenge
Westbeach approached Brandwave with the challenge of refreshing their global brand identity for snow, surf and skate. Along with the creation of a new brand logo, identity and strapline, we were tasked to create a new set of Global brand guidelines to help define and clearly communicate their new brand values both internally and externally. The guidelines were required to communicate the brand’s rich history with Canadian Roots, to where they are now, some 37 years on.
Finally, we were asked to put the new brand guidelines into action by developing a fresh Global creative campaign for the brand including print and digital advertising, point of sale materials, social media assets, and website graphics.
The Result
To ensure that the Westbeach brand guidelines truly reflected their new company ownership, culture and ethos; we kicked-off the strategic consultancy process with an off-site brand positioning workshop. The facilitated workshop included all key stakeholders from the company and helped to reshape a brand that remembered it’s rich heritage while becoming more relevant to new and evolving audiences.
After the workshop, we developed the brand guidelines including the new Westbeach brand values:
• Pioneering
• Empowering
• Authentic
• Positive
We also created key target-market personas along with extensive details on how to implement the new brand values in every aspect of the company’s day-to-day business. In addition to Westbeach’s new logo and strapline, we also created an extensive visual identity guidelines document, which included colour schemes and font-usage parameters.
Following on from this, we created the new intergrated ‘We Are Westbeach’ creative campaign which will launch officially in Autumn/Winter 2016.
