Writer, strategist, go-seeker.
Writer, strategist, go-seeker.
Brand Strategy + Voice + Messaging + Website
Soto creates home repair and design supplies including paint, spackle and kits. While the overwhelming volume of choices at traditional retailers and big box stores can be frustrating to navigate, Soto’s approach is different, with a curated selection of tools, paint and spackle for a more considered and less intimidating experience.
Soto asked us to create an elevated home improvement brand that’s inspiring instead of overwhelming, empowering creative people in their home projects. The challenge was conveying a lifestyle that elevates the brand, distinguishing it from competitors, while keeping it approachable and welcoming for beginners.
For their rebrand, we wanted to show that the tools that make homes beautiful could be beautiful too, closing the gap between aspirational interior design and functional home improvement categories. We envisioned the new brand as a design house making tools for creative people to not only facilitate, but inspire new projects.
We thought about what the audience for this brand really desires when they’re working on their home projects. And the answer was to stay inspired. To be inspired by the working on it part—the choosing colors, the rolling paint—and not just the beginning and the end result. We wanted to make the actual work beautiful and inspiring, too, and to celebrate that process.
We explored working on your home as a creative endeavor that improves the life you live inside it. How, by taking care of your space, you enter into this relationship with it that involves change, compromise and being in conversation with your surroundings. We called that ethos The Living Space, meaning the place where you live your life, but also a space that’s alive with its own history & character.
Our strategic positioning, “beautiful tools and materials for creative people,” inspired the tagline “Artists in Residence,” referring to Soto’s elevated approach, but also to the customer as the artist of their own homes.
We realized that improving your space is also a way of being, a lifestyle of applying your creative energy to make things better. And that this could extend to any area of life, and the larger world, too.
This foundational philosophy guided all of our messaging. From color choices to how-tos, we layered in language that inspires people to think about their living space as a creative endeavor. To not simply fix their homes, but to redesign their world, one project at a time.
Soto considers every aspect of your experience to put home design squarely (and enjoyably) in your wheelhouse.
Since the rebrand, Soto has been picked up by Lowe’s, one of the largest home improvement retailers in the world. They’ve also seen sales double month over month since the brand debuted on the e-commerce website, along with an increase in organic traffic. And that’s AFTER cutting their Google ads budget by 75%.
AD+DESIGN: MATT GRIBBEN // CREATIVE DIRECTION: KATI FORNER // STRATEGY+VERBAL ID+COPY: ALLISON DOBKIN