Vegans are often stereotyped as being boring, unfulfilled, hippies, but, in truth, vegans are usually your average foodies who simply stay away from specific items. Self Studio recently created the new brand Holy that focuses on strong scientific messages while still balancing a playful identity. Essentially, Holy is a brand that delivers consumers a meal plan based on their individual health needs and fitness goals. Because of this significant promise, the branding needed to be professional, confident, and thoroughly engaging, and Self Studio has done an excellent job of delivering.
Following a vegan diet takes a lot of knowledge and careful planning, or you risk missing vital nutrients and vitamins. No wonder there are myths about vegan food being boring, uninventive, and limiting performance. Our client decided to launch a pioneering vegan delivery service aimed at those who want to eat healthy, environmentally conscious food – and even reach fitness goals on a completely plant-based diet – without sacrificing taste and enjoyment. Self Studio was asked to develop a whole new brand for this ambitious value proposition, including a distinct positioning, name, visual identity, and a website where customers could create their own bespoke vegan meal plans based on their nutritional requirements.
In close partnership with the client’s team, we embarked on a discovery phase of competitor research, audience expectations and sector insights. This established the importance of nutritional science in successful vegan diets, and uncovered key trends common to fitness and lifestyle offerings around health and wellbeing. Crucially, we found that younger audiences actively interested in a vegan diet are turned off by the seriousness and sometimes self-righteous tone associated with vegan diets.
We developed a strategic positioning to unite the strong scientific message with a joyful irreverence that would cut through with existing and new vegan audiences. Balancing the inherent idealism of veganism with a touch of confident self-awareness, Holy can both stand for nutritional science, and believe nutrition is sacred. Once we landed the brand name, it informed our direction on language and visual identity, opening rich creative tensions between the sacred, the scientific and the playful, both visually and verbally.
The challenge was to create a system that would automatically generate bespoke meal plans based on the user’s individual health needs and fitness goals. The platform also provides a powerful back-office for the Holy team to manage the website, the meal plans, the kitchens and deliveries with a custom CRM and a production schedule system.
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