Overhauling Brand Architecture for a Global Sports Apparel Manufacturer
Problem
As an athletic apparel manufacturer grew and added additional product lines, brand architecture became increasingly complex— difficult for their teams to manage and for consumers to navigate. Different product lines intersected and overlapped at in seemingly random ways with no clear rationale, creating redundancy and inconsistency that muddied messaging and proliferated SKUs to an untenable point.
This complexity impacted global product, merchandising, marketing, creative, omni-channel teams. The manufacturer understood they needed to simplify and clarify their brand architecture and brought in Excelerate to manage the initiative.
Approach
Excelerate began with assessments and stakeholder interviews across the organization, identifying which people and teams were most impacted and best situated to work towards a solution. In collaboration with the client, the group agreed upon an end state goal and developed seven workstreams to achieve it: framework positioning, visual identify, naming, product mapping, omnichannel touchpoints, systems integration, and brand marketing.
Much of this process was built around subtraction and reorganization as they worked towards telling differentiated product stories, making it easier for consumers to shop and engage. Together, these workstreams developed a new brand architecture by which to name and group products and evaluated over 300 named consumer ideas against this architecture.
Results
Excelerate’s execution discipline enabled an organized, thoughtful, and comprehensive reorganization of a system that had become too complex for employees to manage and customers to understand. From those 300 named apparel collections, the client and Excelerate derived 24 core collection groups.
Excelerate took the client on a simplification and rationalization journey where SKU reduction was not a primary goal but rather a happy result from a full-scale reorganization effort. By rebuilding its brand architecture, the client brought structure and rigor to their operation, providing the space to evolve the brand into the future.