Homeplate was an established peanut butter brand with a good product and a brand identity that wasn't doing it any favors. The old packaging leaned hard on baseball nostalgia. The category had moved on. The shelves were getting crowded with cleaner-looking, ingredient-forward competitors.
The brief: refresh, don't restart.
Homeplate had real equity. Loyal customers. A name they liked. A category position worth fighting for. We didn't need to torch the brand. We needed to update it so it could fight for the shelf in a category that had become a lot more discerning.
From baseball to nostalgia.
We kept what was working (the name, the loyal base, the simplicity of the product) and built a new visual identity around the broader feeling of comfort and home rather than the narrow baseball association. New tagline: "The nostalgic taste you love. The simple ingredients you want."
I led the relaunch end-to-end: market research, brand positioning, packaging design direction, photography, the eCommerce site, and the launch communications. Then we built the channel strategy to match.
The Amazon play.
Most peanut butter brands at the time were treating Amazon as an afterthought. We didn't. I built an Amazon-first eCommerce strategy (listings, A+ content, advertising, review generation, fulfillment) that put Homeplate in front of the kind of consumers who were already shopping for "cleaner" peanut butter alternatives online before they ever showed up in stores.
That single channel added 19% to topline revenue in the first year.
"Rebrand led to an instant 0.6 velocity lift on grocery shelves. Acquisition within 10 months."
The result.
The rebrand drove a 37% increase in overall sales within 12 months, lifted shelf velocity at retail by 0.6, and grew eCommerce by 19%. Ten months after we shipped the new identity, the company was acquired.