RELAUNCHING INTO ORBIT
AVI8TED HOLDINGS
Brand Strategy,
Documentation
& Advertising Material
The Plus Studios partnered with Avi8ted thoughts in late 2018 to develop and execute a digital rebrand and promotional campaign to bolster the brand’s Spring 2019 collection. Avi8ted Thoughts is a DC-based brand with strong roots in the local Music and Arts scenes. Those roots come partly from Avi8ted’s strong history of hosting vibrant and well attended cultural events in DC.
Our strategy was based on a digital campaign that would expand Avi8ted’s online presence while remaining true to the Avi8ted Brand Identity, which is closely tied to the Arts and Music communities in DC. To achieve that, we considered the profile of Avi8ted’s existing user base and developed a strategy that would transfer the energy of Avi8ted’s live events to their digital platforms. As part of the campaign, The Plus Studios produced events, promotional material, a lookbook designed to publish digitally as well as in print, and a documentary that followed Avi8ted’s charitable initiatives for the benefit of local schools.
The key to connecting with any audience is to provide entertainment and to demonstrate genuine interest. To do so, we began by discussing the Avi8ted Brand Identity with the brand’s creative team. We then surveyed the brand’s customers, partners, and competitors to further determine the values and characteristics that we needed to emphasize.
Based on the breakdown of Avi8ted’s existing digital user base, it was clear that Instagram was primary digital platform that could funnel the audience to Avi8ted’s website. Because of that, our content plan was based on developing a consistent visual language for the Brand across social media platforms while providing content that captured the energy of the Avi8ted live experiences.
As being part of the relaunch process, we had a numerous amount of assets to work with. One of our objectives was to help establish consistency for the brand and format their identity. We worked with Charlton and the rest of the AVI8TED team to discover what should stay, what need refreshed, and what we can add. We based these decisions off of who are user base is and what they would find helpful, as well as the ethos and personality of avited. Finally we were able to deliver a gridded texture that would drive a message of development and planning to the brands visuals. We also set typefaces to use for the marketing collateral. This decision provides brand consistency and better legibility for the viewer. Setting these formats allow our viewer to know the its and AVI8TED product.
Because Avi8ted’s 2019 product lineup featured premium clothing with a futuristic theme, it was important for us to create media that would spotlight the design and craftsmanship behind the brand’s products. To achieve that, we produced a photoshoot at 202Creates Studio in Washington, DC, where we also filmed interviews with Avi8ted founders and designers for later use in a documentary we produced to explore the company’s connection to the local community.
One of the most exciting things about working with a brand like Avi8ted is its strong history of working with a variety of artists and designers, which gave the brand a rich and eclectic visual language before our team at Plus ever got involved. Because of that, we knew it was key to accentuate the strengths of the existing Avi8ted branding by applying consistent elements of the brand’s design language in a more uniform, polished way across mediums.
One of the key elements that brought the campaign to life was the hybrid Digital/Print Fall/Winter 2019 lookbook, compiled of our photography alongside the brand’s stored media assets and formatted into 48 pages for digital and print. The digital version of the lookbook also provided a rich bank of social media content for promoting the collection, with individual spreads repackaged into Instagram posts.
Avi8ted Thoughts is an interactive brand. We wanted to carry that element through to the advertising materials. This is some of the animated GIF content we developed to be used in cross platform circumstances where video may not be able to be used, i.e. text offers, and newsletters.
Alongside promoting the 2019 Fall/Winter collection, we produced a Documentary featuring a School Drive led by Avi8ted for the benefit of local Elementary schools. This piece was an opportunity for the wider Avi8ted audience to feel the history and humanity behind the brand, and ultimately further identify with the Avi8ted message. And because the documentary featured footage of recent pop-up events, it also provided the brand’s core audience with a sense of participation and pride.
In addition to embracing the brand’s strong history of pop-up shops and live events, we felt it was important for Avi8ted to develop a consistent theme around each collection that could draw in first-time users. Following discussion with the brand’s Creative Director, we developed the Plane Sight: Maximum Altitude concept for Instagram using imagery based on military aviation.
Thanks to a lot of hard work from everyone involved, we helped make the Avi8ted Thoughts 2019 Relaunch and Fall/Winter campaign the brand’s most successful season to date. The Avi8ted user base was energized by the social media and live events campaigns, and online sales significantly improved with catalog-style photography.
In a positive sign for the brand’s future, the polished and engaging releases garnered a new level of Press and Celebrity recoginition for the campaign, with endorsements from local publications as well as high profile artists alike.