/ Brand Strategy / Art Direction / Graphic Design
When Stio Brand Manager Stirling Cobb approached our team at Voicebox West with the task of creating a naming convention playbook from scratch, we knew it would take creative horsepower and Dan Kostrzewski’s long history with the brand. Voicebox Brand Strategist Adrienne Schofhauser dug deep to understand Stio’s naming landscape and uncover key themes currently represented in their product collections. Dan and Adrienne led discovery sessions with Stio’s exceptionally passionate brand team and analyzed every aspect of their current process and outputs.
The result was a 64-page naming bible with the guardrails and creative structure to drive the internal naming process, ensure names reinforce the Stio brand, and standardize the process for evaluating future names and hierarchies. The comprehensive playbook outlined the attributes of a good Stio name, logical taxonomies, thematic naming buckets with contextual stories, word-by-word naming conventions, consistency rules, a product catalog, and a workflow aligned with Stio’s annual product launches. It is the ultimate multi-tool to wrangle what was fast becoming a chaotic exercise for the extremely high-growth brand.
The months-long project was presented to great acclaim from the stakeholder team, including Stio’s founder and CEO, who lauded it as an invaluable tool for maintaining the culture, creativity and distinction of Stio’s mountain-town infused names for a decade to come.
