Evolution of the Back to Roots Brand
Through the years of working on branding projects, I have often found measuring the timeframe for finding the perfect brand image for your business can be like finding a needle in a haystack.
Brands are always evolving and often mature in line with the business. With Back To Roots, the experience has been no different.
Those who are more eagle eyed in the tribe may have noticed a series of subtle but impactful changes to the Back To Roots brand over the past couple of years. I thought I would take a minute to explain the reason for this development and why it is so crucial to the plans of B2R as we grow.
Above: The abbreviated ‘hashtag’ logo.
Information isn’t the issue
You may have noticed that there is a running theme of using the phrase “information isn’t the issue”. Our team, peers and tribe are often inundated with reams of statistics on social media and via endless white papers (looking at you Mr McCambridge) on a daily basis. Therefore, the ability to be able to present such information in impactful, presentable and enjoyable ways certainly is the issue at hand. This challenge sits at the forefront of our minds. We may not have reached our destination (as branding is a fluid process, we are unlikely to ever get there), but is great to be on our way!
Above: The 3-year evolution of the Back To Roots brand through its 3 key stages.
Making a name...
Roughly 3 years ago, Luke popped in to the studio in Builth Wells With a dream and and and unwavering passion to launch his own business and help to reinvent his corner of healthcare industry. Nothing like a simple Monday morning project then! As a returning Builth Wells boy, Luke was well known in the local community, however as a healthcare professional, he was relatively unknown. Our first challenge was to build his name as the go-to expert for delivering a biopsychosocial model of pain management in Mid Wales. Luke had already been playing around with the name “Back To Roots” to describe his Blue Zone living model and even had a B2R Facebook page. But we decided that by using his own name for the company would generate a better return, at least for the early years. Word of mouth is by far the most potent form of marketing in Mid Wales and it would have made our challenge all the more difficult if we hadn’t looked to build his name first. Luke R. Davies (Chiro, Fitness, Play) was born!
Life (and health and wellbeing) is never a straight line
The next stage of the brand evolution needed to focus on a key, recurring message. If managing your health and wellbeing was easy, we’d all be pain-free athletes. We believe that humans are clouds, not clocks. A mechanic’s approach to fixing a body is often unhelpful for non-critical ailments, like chronic pain. We never wanted to build a company based on unrealistic promises or “miracle cures”. We are evidence based and believe in hard work (we also have a hell of a lot of fun along the way!).
A natural progression of the brand was to introduce the B2R “squiggle” to highlight that the transformation from sensitive to robust (people) is rarely achieved in a straight line.
The final step, at least for now!
We had been using Amatic SC (Small Caps) as our font for some time and although it presented the right 'feel' for back to roots, it has become so popular that within 12 months of rolling it out, we couldn’t help but notice it popping up everywhere we looked. That was a well-known risk of using open source fonts and Amatic SC is readily available on Google fonts. As the business had evolved we decided to go down the route of paying for our own new font, increasing the chance of having our own unique appearance in the competitive health and wellbeing industry.
In addition to the new font, there were also a couple of additional evolvements of the overall brand, including the increased usage of black and white photography in the Squarespace website and via our social media channels (a huge thank you Jeremy Walker for the idea and a fresh pair of eyes!).
