Accelerate
The Shine Secret Sauce.
Bringing a brand to life so that it feels like the trusted, leading expert; yet totally human.
The challenge.
Shine For Women was the leading coaching company for mid-senior level professional women, and worked with some of the world’s largest companies including WPP, Nike, Rothschild & Co, William Grant & Sons and TikTok.
When I joined, the company had been through a period of fast growth, so there had been limited investment in defining the Shine positioning, visual and tonal brand guidelines and formal marketing activity. The challenge had been, and continued to be, that Shine needed to appeal to multiple stakeholders across a single client - from the women that attended the programmes, through to HR, L&D and DE&I practitioners, and up to CFOs and CEOs as the ultimate decision makers (who were statistically not women themselves).
As an organisation with the purpose of ‘making the world more human’, yet one that operated in large-scale corporations, the brand needing rebalancing. It also didn’t feel global enough, despite the fact that women from across the globe had been through its coaching programmes and as a company operating in the DE&I space.
There was a strong ambition for growth, and the emergence of new VC-backed and slick competitors in the market, so the brand needed to evolve.
The solution.
With average NPS scores of 100%, and feedback that Shine was ‘life-changing’, the first step was to speak to women that had been through a programme to see what made it so special. This became ‘The Shine Secret Sauce’ - a unique formula that we ensured would always apply to everything we did.
I then briefed the design agency The Wern, choosing Hadrien because everything he does has loads of personality and fun. Shine is about inspiring women to live a more confident life, so it had to feel bold, aspirational, but also real - not too glossy and unrelatable as so many women’s lifestyle brands can be.
Hadrien provided us with a core suite of brand assets, which I then applied across the business. I established a brand hierarchy which had to flex and evolve as we developed new products, flowing this out into sales and delivery materials. The result was a clearer and more compelling ‘off-the-shelf’ product offering which clients could easily adapt for a bespoke experience.
As external demand shaped our programmes to include people of all genders, I explored ways to bring this in visually, and evolved our use of language to ensure modernity and relevancy, whilst staying true to our expertise in women.
The results.
Prior to the close of Shine For Women, there was a consistent and compelling brand identity, and revenue was estimated to increase +50% YoY.