Andrea Garay - Sage Sleep

Project Overview

Sage Sleep™ is a small, woman-owned business founded by Brandy Alvis that focuses on creating hand-crafted, organic bedding products. Located in Auburn, California, the company strives for creating a safer and happier sleeping environment by providing specialized pillows that are customized to each individual and relying heavily on sustainability. They are aware of the dangers of toxic materials that are often used by larger corporations in their products and therefore have turned to a more eco-friendly solution. Since they are a small company, they needed help with expanding their brand which is why this rebrand was initiated. This case study entails all the research components and elements that went into creating this rebrand.

Tools: Adobe Illustrator, InDesign, Canva, Shopify
Skills: UX/UI Design, Brand Strategy, Marketing

Discovery & Research

Before joining the team, I noticed there was a lack of consistency with their brand since it has been messed around with time and time again. This was apparent in their social media ads since it showed different visual styles and made it difficult to recognize them. This interfered with their vision for the company since they wanted to focus more their story: people who are passionate about the environment and creating a more sustainable future. In addition, they also needed help with creating content to expand their business reach and whom to focus on. With all this in mind, I narrowed it down to these four key points:

1.  Develop a brand style guide that explains the official guidelines for the new "look"
2.  Establish specific goals that will help center the focus of the company's vision
3.  Gain understanding of a direct audience group that the company will cater to
4.  Create more engagement and interaction to expand their business reach

Brand Strategy

We focused our research primarily on the environmental factor—what goes into making our products and how can we show more of that? By providing an entirely new marketing strategy, we have turned our attention to educating our customers on the health and wellness benefits. They are anti-microbial, animal cruelty free, eco-friendly, and hypo-allergenic. Our pillows are 100% customizable, made from a wide selection of organic materials, and can cater toward different needs such as sleeping positions and temperature regulation. They also have a longer duration period than most companies and are G.O.T.S. certified. We believe that implementing this marketing strategy can help empower our customers because they are more aware of what they are buying. Ideally, this would appear more in our advertisements and hopefully gain a more engaged audience.

Ideal Audience

Through our research, we looked into our target audience. Who is this company for and how can we learn more about them? We looked into the demographics that would most likely appeal to our company and eventually came up with what we call L.O.H.A.S (Lifestyle of Health and Sustainability). This ideal audience is a market segment that tends to focus more on health and fitness, the environment, personal development, and has an interest for sustainable living and social justice. To understand our audience, we created some user personas of ideal customers. See below.

New Brand Vision

Brand Personality

Now that we gathered our information, it's important that we start thinking of visuals to help bring this brand to life. Below shows a mood board I created to help establish the "look" and "feel" of the rebrand. The goal for this was to capture the essence of a clean relaxing, and cultivated atmosphere. I was mainly inspired by the bohemian aesthetic which is where most of these photos stem from. It consists of neutral colors, organic shapes, plant imagery, Mother Earth, and some existing Sage Sleep photos. This is what later inspired me to create the brand vision, mission statement, descriptive key words, and core values.

Brand Elements

Application

A series of guidelines was created to show how this rebrand can be implemented in creating promotional material for the company. Using the approved brand elements, will help maintain consistency and build our brand identity. Furthermore, this will help the marketing team produce more specific-oriented ads and figure out what kind of content to put out there. These can be seen through a range of materials such as social media ads, website graphics, booklets, brochures, and postcards.

Digital Collateral

Seasonal Ad

Promotion Sale Story

Review Post

Print Collateral

Gift Guide booklet

Catalogue Guide

Pillow Insert

Thank You Card

Disclaimer: I have been given permission to share this project for viewing purposes. It is not meant to be redistributed.