Boa Systems
From ingredient brand to lifestyle brand: Boa's strategic transformation.
In 2001, Boa founder Gary Hammerslag embarked on a mission to reinvent shoelaces, introducing the innovative Boa System for faster, more convenient lacing in snowboard boots. Over the next two decades, Boa expanded across multiple industries, embedding their technology in millions of products.
Now Boa had a new goal: elevate their consumer brand presence and become a household name.
As Strategy Director at Cinco, my role was to guide Boa's global team in clarifying their brand purpose, evolving their positioning and messaging to directly engage end-users.
To begin, I led analysis of international research research to understand consumer perceptions, sentiment and awareness of the Boa brand across Asia, Europe and North America.
Building on these insights we identified the mindset that united all Boa’s diverse audiences across multiple segments, and developed dimensional Personas for each category.
Through a series of collaborative positioning workshops we examined key trends driving the marketplace, competitor differentiation, and how many of their brand partners were telling vastly different stories about Boa.
Together we cyrstallized Boa’s strategic brand direction—distilling Boa’s purpose and promise in a resonant Brand Platform, Manifesto and Tagline.
At the project’s outset, Boa was perceived as a one-size-fits-all solution—merely a replacement for traditional laces—rather than an upgrade.
We helped highlight both their innovative roots and purpose-driven passion for performance, moving the Brand’s identity beyond the reference to the dial, and repositioning the brand around owning the experience of fit.
On this project I also served as lead copywriter, working with the team to develop Tone & Voice guidelines that reflected Boa’s consumer-forward position, and a comprehensive Messaging Framework deigned to meaningfully engage each of their core verticals, while delivering a unified promise.
Partnering closely with the creative team to develop design principles, I helped to evolve Boa's identity and experience to highlight—not just as a lace replacement, but as a total fit upgrade.
Finally, I collaborated with design team to develop a cohesive, user-centric UX strategy for an intuitive web experience that would resonate with the brand’s multiple audiences, partners and categories.
The company launched their rebrand with the new website, featuring elevated storytelling and visual content, seasonal initiatives and product success stories, to resounding excitement from Boa’s brand partners.