How to Celebrate Your Brand's New Identity

It is not uncommon for marketers and brand strategists to get tired and feel uninspired by the apparel and merchandise that the company falls back on year after year, especially if a rebranding campaign is on the horizon.

There is no better time to celebrate a brand’s identity when it has been given a fresh look and maybe even taken a new direction to reach a new audience or market.

A rebrand is a major company milestone. Those who are successful in celebrating and capitalizing on it also spend time carefully building high-level custom apparel and promotional product lines.

Many people associate rebranding with too much of a challenge that they don’t necessarily have the know-how or time to take on. They are stressful. They are expensive. They need a lot of creative juice.

It’s easy to look at rebranding like this and keep it at an arm’s length or keep putting it off, but when executed thoughtfully, you’ll wonder why you waited so long to dive in.

We’ve worked on hundreds of rebrand campaigns with craft breweries, nonprofit, retail, and lifestyle brands, starting with creating a brand toolkit that then feeds their custom collections and strategic direction.

Follow these tips to eliminate many of the perceived challenges and increase the overall impact of a rebranding campaign.

Execute on something different and use it as a launching point to shape your brand experience

With room in the budget for some creative development, lean on the latest trends to tie the brand story in a relevant way, but that breaks the mold from what the company has done in the past.

How can a simple water bottle or t-shirt be made differently? What are the details that can help them stand out? How can these items make the brand shine and build the new look’s confidence?

Design apparel and merchandise collections around the new identity

Lots of brands that leverage custom collections to feed growth and engagement see a dip because they have been so logo-centric.

This is likely because time is scarce and resources are even scarcer. Yet, applying their mark on blank apparel or promotional items is no longer cutting it and something has to budge.

With a new brand identity at the ready, the brand assets can be used creatively — showcasing the brand in a new way that retains brand recognition.

Our team will collaborate with you to develop a curated apparel and merchandise collection that authentically represents your brand and shares a compelling story with your audience.

You can still leverage everyday promotional products, but employ a variety of high-end, unique custom decor techniques, for example, that grab your audience’s attention and that help create an overall brand experience.

Launch the new identity around an event

Use the big industry conference or annual company event to drum up hype around the new identity — before, during, and after.

Custom merchandise and apparel collections can really help boost the event and help insurmountably to relay the brand’s story while contributing significantly to the experience.

Your audience is already psyched to attend the event and with exciting updates such as a new brand look and feel, it’s the perfect time to share the news.

Hand out or structure giveaways with items that have the new identity creatively showcased. Elevate go-to conference items like a year-specific t-shirt or sweatshirt, a custom hat, or notebook, but uniquely display that new identity in ways you may not have leveraged before.

Use brand applications such as custom screen printing, custom interior hat taping, sublimation, puff embroidery, alternative materials, and so much more.

The more unique — both in item selection and brand application — the more collectible the products will be and the more powerful they will be at spreading the word.

We recently worked with a client that went as far as including items that attendees can take back to their families since they had to take time away from them to attend. This small touch can go a long way and help elongate the brand’s values and ethos that much further.