Ten Thousand Islands

After designing and producing footwear for international designer brands for over 20 years, our client decided to create the Ten Thousand Islands brand. To compete successfully in a highly competitive market, the product had to have that rare quality – a genuine, unique-selling proposition. The design concept is a multi-purpose summer shoe, ultra-lightweight, fully breathable and water friendly, that is as comfortable and practical during the day, as it is a fashion statement and stylish at night. Our job was to create a powerful brand positioning and a stand-out visual.

Although the unique features and benefits of the Ten Thousand Islands Freestate product range are impressive, there was a need to come up with a big positioning idea to make it the undisputed ‘go to’ summer shoe. The positioning strategy was to take the territory of summer. The brand identity was based on a bisected graphic expression of the sun, thereby creating a brand mark that was unmistakably all about the summer and alluding to the unique ‘day and night’ performance of the product.

The positioning of taking the territory of summer is expressed with ‘feel good’ photography, carefully considered product shots, target market photo profiles and a copy line that in just four words sums up ownership of the summer footwear market – ‘The Sole of Summer’.

As crowd funding has been one of the ways that finance has been raised to launch the Ten Thousand Islands brand, its success on both Kickstarter and Indiegogo, where financial targets were exceeded, is a measure of the success to date and the exciting future that awaits this game-changing product innovation.