There was a time when Marc Evon Enterprises enjoyed a comfortable living manufacturing skate blade guards. You see Marc had the patent on the product, and little in the way of competition. Everything changed when his patent ran out, and the world of skate blade guards changed forever. The first to seize on the opportunity were the Chinese. The marketplace was almost immediately flooded with exact copies of Marc’s blade guards costing many dollars less. Alarming as this was, Marc decided he wouldn’t just roll over and play dead – he would fight.

I got a call from Marc. He wanted to meet to discuss his company and how I could help to re-brand the blade guards to better position them as the quality guard of choice. As it stood at the time, they were generally identical.The one mistake that was made in the past was that the product was sold as a generic guard, for numerous other retailers and they labeled it with their images. Marc’s product had no brand of it’s own. One saving grace was that Marc Evon Enterprises DID have brand respect with all the top skaters in figure skating, world-wide.

Time to dig in.

Well – the first task was to develop a name that we could grow with and which would inspire the marketplace. The team settled on “Guardog™” with one D. It was playful, and since a guard dog is a security icon, its protective qualities fit what we were trying to say.

Next was the logo for Guardog™. Of course, a dog would be the main icon. We wanted an illustrative logo because we felt it would be a better reflection of the playful nature of the product, and it’s demographic was predominantly a younger skew. As you can imagine we went through a whole kennel of dog images. What was settled upon was a Disneyesque dog. It was matched up with a distinctive typographic approach and “Guardog™ – Anything else is a mutt™ was born. The slogan spoke to the quality of the guard against the competition. It also set the playful tone of the emerging brand.

Marketing materials including POP, trade show promotions, online efforts, and packaging were developed to establish a consistent brand image. Brand values expressed in all materials were fun, young and progressive. New products were brought on stream branded with their own sub-brands under the main Guardog banner head. Eventually, the different guard markets adopted their own distinctive dog logos. Figure borrowed from the original logo, hockey adopted a bulldog, speed is a greyhound, and blade covers took on a Shar-Pei. All the blade guards, and covers have Guardog™ identification boldly placed.

In the five years since the initial launch, Guardog™ is widely respected and is recognized as the original skate guard. Marc’s effort has allowed him to start taking back lost market share and still get a few dollars more for his product. Guardog™ is a prestige brand, and young skaters desire its products.

One lesson to take from this short case history, is that in every seemingly disastrous event there lies opportunity. Look for the silver lining. It would have been very easy for Marc Evon Enterprises to simply throw up their hands and walk away at the seemingly endless resources of the over-seas manufacturing environment. They saw the opportunity to raise the bar and capture the quality niche within the skate guard category that they had a large part in developing.

Check out the <a href=”http://www.guardog.ca”>Guardog™ world.</a>