(Photo | Courtesy of BN Branding)
Back in the summer of 2019, Dan Corrigan and his partners at Organic 3 Inc. realized they needed help with their branding. They had a successful e-commerce operation, and one of the leading brands of probiotics, but they were selling their products under a hodge-podge of names and identities with no clear brand strategy or marketing plan.
“We were all over the place,” Corrigan said. “We were growing rapidly, throwing new products out into the market without ever stopping to think about our image or our overall branding efforts. We needed to be more proactive, and we joked that we needed a good dose of vitamin B. So I found BN Branding and we gave them a call.”
The team from BN Branding spent time in Detroit interviewing the key stakeholders and assessing all the elements of the company’s operation. It was a deep dive that revealed some important insight into the roots of the company, the brand and the cultural trends that were driving the supplement business.
“We were very impressed with Organic 3’s authentic mission and their managerial discipline in most of their business,” said John Furgurson, owner of BN Branding, which is based in Bend and serves clients from Canada to Costa Rica.
“They follow a structured system of protocols and processes, but their branding wasn’t aligned with what we saw in Detroit. Actually, it was a mess.”
The first order of business was to research the health benefits of probiotics, enzymes and all the vitamins and minerals that Organic 3 offered. The company had 18 different SKUs, and each one involved a long rabbit hole of information.
“Even though we have plenty of experience in the vitamin and mineral category, we still had to do the research,” Furgurson said. “There’s so much bad information out there, we approach it kind of like an embedded reporter… you have to get close to the front lines and spend some time in the trenches to dig up the most valuable nuggets of insight.”
For Organic 3, the consensus was clear: They needed to streamline their product line-up and reorganize the remaining products under one compelling brand.
“We thought we wanted to keep the GutPro name and introduce a new brand for our other lines,” Corrigan said. “We even had a name in mind, but we ran into some pretty painful trademark issues with that. Luckily, the team at BN Branding pointed us in a much better direction.”
“It’s always hard when you recommend, early on, that they abandon products and dump all the names that they currently have,” Furgurson said. “But focus is one of the hallmarks of great branding. We helped them articulate exactly what that focus should be, and what their brand should look like going forward.”
That’s how Smidge small-batch supplements was born.
BN Branding invented a whole new category of supplements, devised the brand name and designed the new identity. It was a classic case of choosing the one name that produced the most divisive feedback in early research.
“It was very contentious, at first. People either loved it, or hated it,” Furgurson said. “That’s how we knew ‘Smidge’ was going to be a winning brand.”
The naming process is never easy. In this case, Furgurson and his team just had to show a lot of other names that were good, but not THAT good. Eventually, all the partners at Organic 3 came around to Smidge.
“I give them a lot of credit for embracing the new identity completely. They could have come up with a hundred reasons not to, but they trusted us, and went with their gut,” Furgurson said.
“I was impressed with the process that BN Branding followed,” Corrigan said. “They produced a thorough brand strategy document that got everyone on the same page and took the guesswork out of the approval process. So when we were looking at names — and later at logos — we had a clear roadmap to follow. It was easy to see that Smidge was perfectly aligned with our brand personality, our operation and the current market opportunities.”
Once the naming process and trademark work was complete, the BN Branding team designed the brand identity, the packaging, advertising and the entire look and feel for all Smidge stuff.
“Packaging in this category is challenging,” Corrigan said. “There are a lot of FDA rules that we have to follow to the letter, and very little space to work with. But we love what BN Branding came up with… all the little details of it. The bubbles and the cheerful colors and the logo, and the tagline and little spoon. Not only that, everything’s organized and color-coded into product categories, which improves efficiency in our shipping operation. It’s all great.”
But just because the packaging design is done doesn’t mean BN Branding’s job is complete.
“Now that we have a good foundation to build on we can start looking for creative new ways to tell our story,” Corrigan said. “That’s one thing I’ve learned from John… the Branding process is never over.”
