Groundwork designed the Grizzly Supplements brand, a fan favorite that quickly scaled to over $1 million in its first year of sales.

Project Objective

Diversify and expand DD Beverage & Nutrition’s portfolio of sports supplements by designing for a fresh segment of fans.

To begin, Groundwork’s creative director and chief strategist, Nate Ripley, met with CEO Andrew Drayson and the DDBN team to facilitate collaborative, customer-focused brand strategy sessions. Together, Groundwork and DDBN identified insights that laid the foundation for the project’s success. We created customer profiles and brand values defining what Grizzly stands for and why it matters.

Services Provided

Brand Strategy

Brand Identity Design

Packaging Design

Social Media Design

Grizzly's Ideal Customer

Socially active, West coast student-athletes leading fun, impulse-driven lifestyles, fulfilled by fitting in, and attracted to outdoor adventures and cool factor.

Grizzly's Brand Values

A grassroots gains supplement brand with a rugged, popular look and West coast lifestyle vibes, so outdoorsy student-athletes can show social proof that they’re fit for any adventure.

Brand Development

Brand strategy is a powerful tool, but it’s only as effective as its implementation. High-fidelity mood boards help translate strategic x’s and o’s into visual language. A good mood board should model our ideal customer’s best life, reflect their goals and aspirations, and help us vibe with them. It’s a visual extension of the customer profiles we developed during brand strategy and the logical next step in brand-building.

From mood boards come concepts, and from concepts come finished brands. After several rounds of development, Groundwork and DDBN settled on Grizzly's final look.

Athletic,

rugged,

outdoorsy,

masculine,

youthful,

adventurous,

and energetic.

Brand Applications

Part of the brand design process is to think outside of the 16:9 box.

Designing a brand to look great in the vacuum-sealed confines of a computer screen is one thing. Making sure it looks great in the real world is another. Brand elements need to thrive in a massive range of applications. They need to look great from screen to print, from a tiny thumbnail image on Instagram to a gigantic billboard spanning the side of a 12-story building.

In Grizzly’s case great merchandise, apparel, and advertising designs were especially important based on customer preferences and product use.

Packaging Design

Product packaging is an extension of the customer and their wants.

In addition to UX considerations like read order and use occasion, DDBN wanted Grizzly to be dynamic enough to find on the shelf with a passing glance. The brand’s key color, “quicksand,” shines here. It’s different enough to stand out among competitors but still speaks clearly to an adventure-seeking, athletic audience.

The brand’s wild flavors were another consideration. Committing to the principle of “show, don’t tell,” we decided with DDBN to feature bold flavor imagery. The result is a more engaging retail experience and a product line that’s easier to understand and identify—a tangible win with a bottom-line impact.

Social Media Design

Even the freshest design in the world is irrelevant if no one has heard of you.

Like the rest of the brand-building process, social media design centers around customer desires. Customers want to buy to belong. So if you create an identity your customers connect with, they'll buy-in. Successful social media design is about clearly broadcasting that identity. When your true fans hear the message, they'll know you're for them and that they're for you too.

Project Results & Impact

DD Beverage and Nutrition’s new Grizzly Supplements line was an immediate success, generating over $1 million in revenue in its first year. National retail chain GNC Canada was so impressed they moved to carry the brand exclusively.

Grizzly is now available nationwide at GNC stores. The brand wins new fans through social media and GNC regularly promotes Grizzly, both in-store and online. The brand continues to grow quickly year over year.