If you follow us on social media, you probably caught the reveal of our new brand identity, including our logo, tagline and packaging. It was a very taxing but worthwhile journey; After almost a year of introspection, research, sweat and tears, we couldn’t be prouder of the final product. Nothing could have prepared us for the overwhelmingly positive feedback from our customers and supporters. That has made it truly worth it.
The Start
ReelFruit’s journey has never been easy. From the company’s inception, we’ve always been fighting an uphill battle on several fronts: Introducing new products into the market people had never known before, trying to get our distribution right when no one wanted to distribute “new products” on our behalf, trying to scale a “premium” product…you name it, we faced it. We had to pick our battles, and packaging was not one we could fight consistently. To get brand uniformity is not just a time consuming process, it is also very expensive. You have to spend on packaging design, printing all new packaging at once, and writing off old packaging material. It is a huge capital outlay that we couldn’t afford till now.
As you can see below, our packaging design…umm progressively deteriorated (to put it mildly) as we chose launching and distributing new products in the market as quickly as possible over brand uniformity. In summary, we didn’t have the time — nor finances — to make the investment in brand uniformity.
The Process
After deciding to re-brand, we realized that a simple brand refresh wasn’t going to be enough. We had come to a point in our journey where we needed to rethink on our mission, vision, culture and our core values and reflect that in our new brand identity. We went through a process of workshops, culture surveys, focus groups to finalize and agree on who we are and what we stand for. We then decided to reflect this in our new brand identity, which was brought to life so beautifully in the most comprehensive brand book prepared for us by our brand agency, Evoke Lagos.
We’ve come a long way since 2012, both literally and figuratively. We’ve learned a lot along and have come into our own as a company with a clear mission and on a unique journey. We can’t share every detail in this article but here are the main reasons we decided to rebrand:
We were very dissatisfied with our visual identity.
We felt our former packaging had become dated and unrepresentative of the caliber of company we are building. Not only was it very scattered, our once ‘innovative’ packaging had now become obsolete and boring. It was clear we needed to do something visual to maintain our position in the market.
We wanted to unify our packaging
We realized that for the sake of brand consistency and trust, we needed to unify our packaging identity. Many customers were not aware of our full range because every product looked different from the other. Today, we have 16 SKUs, sold in over 350 stores nationwide. At a glance, our range was in no way uniform, which caused a shelving nightmare in stores.
The more we grew and expanded into new regions, it became abundantly clear that this was necessary. We wanted our customers to easily recognize all our products and know the full extent of our product ‘family.’
We wanted to present a global brand
For those who don’t know, we are extremely passionate about building a Nigerian company that can go global. This is reflected in our business pursuits so we wanted it to reflect in our packaging.
For us, it’s not just about communicating a better brand look and feel, but having our customers resonate better with our “why”
What next?
We’re still the same ambitious team working hard to push the boundaries and create unique products. We have 4 new products we’ll be launching soon and we can’t wait to share more about that.
Going forward, we will be more intentional about communicating to our community in the most authentic ways possible.
We look forward to continuing this journey…together.
P/S: Shout Outs
The rebrand has been a rewarding team effort, and we would personally like to thank our staff, our wonderful agency, Evoke Lagos, our investors, our board of advisors, and above all, customers. We are glad all parties are happy with the result. The feedback has been wonderful.
