Native Roots Cannabis Company

Client: Native Roots
Services: Art Direction, Logo and Brand Design, Identity and Collateral Design, Illustration
Support: Design – Becca Reitz & Greg D’Amico. Photography – Jason Siegel, Justin Walker

Rebranding and repositioning Colorado’s largest cannabis dispensary.

With a major shift in the cannabis industry over the past few years, Native Roots, the largest dispensary in Colorado, acknowledged that their target audience was evolving. The brand was catered to a consumer base of rebels and pot heads, but they saw a need to capture more of the light/occasional audience—someone who would have been turned off by Native Roots’ previously aggressive and fragmented brand.

By taking the most iconic elements of this brand and rethinking their application, appearance and strategy helped leverage established brand equity while also repositioning Native Roots as a refined, timeless, and knowledgable brand with a whimsical nod. This process positioned Native Roots to capture new cannabis market attention without ostracizing their loyal consumer-base.

This blog post takes a deeper dive into the process, strategy and creative impetus behind the Native Roots rebrand.

Before (the brand was using two different logos)

After

Visual Identity

Strategically rethinking and reworking the logos, word marks and illustrations to find consistency, simplicity, and relevance helped add new layers of depth, cohesion and sophistication to the Native Roots visual identity. This approach helped unify the formerly disparate brand elements and allowed Native Roots to lean into current brand equity while still allowing the company to make significant strides towards reaching a larger, growing market.

Many key stakeholders and employees had a strong affinity for the old brand, so we created a before/after video to show that not only were their opinions heard, but that the updates we made were a clear evolution that was rooted in the history of the brand.

Responsive Branding

We developed a “visual toolbox” of assets that enables the Native Roots brand to be as elastic, flexible and adaptive as the cannabis industry itself. This expansive brand system is used across all touch points—both print and digital—and enables the brand to remain adaptive in this ever-evolving industry.

The main logo has the ability to easily adopt new sub-brands as the business grows and pivots.

Our Approach

We started out with a rigorous discovery phase that consisted dozens of stakeholder interviews, in-depth audits of marketing research materials, and a deep dive into the history of the brand and various design artifacts.

The Native Roots identity was well-liked by a handful, but the executive team had identified a need to evolve the brand to capture the attention of the evolving cannabis market.

Our design solution provided an identity that not only paid homage to the heritage of the brand, but also offered a solution for where the brand needs to go in the future, which enabled us to find congruence on direction with the larger Native Roots team.

Process

The tree had built up a good deal of brand equity, and it was the physical embodiment of the company’s “roots” — where they had come from. With that known, we knew the solution was unlikely to loose the tree completely, so we explored countless new iterations of the tree to ensure that the decided solution was founded in exploration.

Additionally, the logotype was an evolution of their two previous logotypes. The gaudy, gothic serifs were reduced to a copper-plate style serif that carries qualities of trustworthiness and timelessness, and the tall, condensed forms took inspiration from their sans serif logotype which had a clean, modern, approachable look.

Each of the additional elements were considered and reworked as to best fit the updated brand positioning of Native Roots

The Wallpaper Pattern

The previous brand wallpaper was an ostentatious array of stoner-culture and irrelevant brand elements: strains of cannabis no longer carried, a UFO and cow, and an afro—all created in different styled illustrations. The black and white nature of this wallpaper, although memorable, made for an overwhelming entrance in any Native Roots location. Not to mention, the wallpaper pattern was plastered all over packaging and signage as well.

This updated system of icons is an intentional amalgamation of brand, product and experience–based communications. Intended to constantly evolve and change with both the business and the industry, these were based on an already-assessed desire to update this system, and they were created in an easy-to-replicate mono-line style for the Native Roots team. Not only are these elements able to be picked and pulled apart for more story telling opportunities, but the warmer, tone-on-tone application makes for a significantly more approachable wallpaper and brand pattern.

Interior and Exterior Signage and brand elements

Utilizing the new brand assets created, the interior and exterior signage produced strikes a balance between premium and approachability. Ranging from extruded, back-lit signs to hollowed out letterforms filled with “grass”, the signage used was yet another design element that Native Roots did not overlook.

The Results

Not only was the brand refresh warmly received by the internal team, but when faced with market testing, the results overwhelmingly showed that our brand refresh was a leap in the right direction.

• 78% found the refreshed interior more appealing and approachable

• 62% found the refreshed brand more distinctive

• 76% found the refreshed brand more visually appealing