The founder of CARV, Jamie Grant had invented a product that was able to understand the dynamics of foot pressure and balance that go into mastering skiing and deliver it as audio coaching.
They were about to launch the newest evolution of the product Carv 2 — which was a huge step forward - more accuracy, greater simplicity, with far less limitations - as it does its magic in every terrain, with just a tiny clip on your boot.
I teamed up with Alex, VP of Marketing on how to bring the new product to market and ultimately how to reposition the brand. The key to understanding CARV is their absolute committment to the data that informs better skiing. Skiing first, data a very close second.
Getting better at skiing is actually very difficult. It takes time, practice and investment and doesn’t come by chance.
Changing habits needs continual reinforcement and reward. And it’s not obvious to everyone that the control that you can attain over the physics of skiing IS the best experience. Also, improvement is neither linear, nor logical for all skiers.
But the truth is Learning to Ski is a misnomer — no one learns to ski, it’s a continual practice like Surfing. Even the greatest skiiers continue to learn, they learn by skiing.
From this it became obvious that we should reverse the axiom. Flip Learn to Ski on its head — ‘Ski to Learn’
This thought was very contentious for the team, who were deeply focused on advanced skiiers. But sometimes a challenging thought is the best thing to embrace. Imagine the great Ted Ligety wearing a shirt saying ‘Ski to Learn’ — showing that even the best skier works hard to get better.
The company accepted the thought.
From there we needed to build a system. We wanted to find a way to create a visual path through the snow from just data. Hatti found the unlock from looking at the comparrison of angles. If we could step and repeat the angles of the ski along a path it would form a line — a path down the mountain formed in data.
We were able to deduce two distinct visual languages from the wordmark, round forms from the C and R and angular forms from the A and V. From there it was easy to construct angles and the system unfolded.
Team
Marc Shillum — Brand Strategy & Identity
Hatti Lim — Data Visualization
Jessie V — Motion
Ashleigh Maxwell — Tone & Voice
Alex Jackson — VP Marketing at CARV
Jack Mecklenburgh — Design at CARV
Mark Davison — Content at CARV
Photographic References
Oskar Enander
Lee Cohen
Tim Simmons
Max Draeger
Richard Walch
John Huet
Richard Avendon