Nathan Fa’avae and Cameron Lawes chat about their experience during their full rebrand, renaming and repositioning from Absolute Wilderness to Real Meals.
“My name is Nathan Fahavayi. I’m one of the directors and owners of Real Meals Freeze Dried Food. We have a small business in Nelson that makes the best freeze dried meals available for New Zealand adventurers and we’re really passionate about what we do.
Before we started working with Re:brand, I really didn’t know much about the rebranding process. I always thought it was just sort of changing the name of a company. But working with Term and the crew at Re:brand, I realised there’s so much more to it. Not just the brand, but also the logo, the font and the philosophy.
The first thing Re:brand really looked at was the name. Was the wilderness aspect worth keeping or was it worth changing? They did a lot of research into the market and recommended that we should change the name.
That whole journey of building the brand was super interesting. It was so much more than just the logo and the name. It was really getting into the mechanics and the heart of the company. What we do, what is special about us, and how we portray those things to consumers.
The guys at Re:brand have a really neat, practical template and process to work through. I’m a reasonably logical kind of guy, so having that process and a plan, I enjoyed knowing where we were going and how we were going to get there.
Whenever I had questions, I’d ask them. There were no dumb questions and it was just fun getting their input and perspective on things.
We’ve completely rebooted the entire brand. Everything’s changed. The name, the logo, the website, the packaging, the colours, everything. It’s a very different product and a very different beast from what it was before.
All the feedback has been positive and the changes Re:brand helped us make have already put the whole business and our brand into a much more aligned position so that it actually works for us.
Since we launched Real Meals, it’s been an amazing success story. We’ve more than doubled our sales since we were trading as Episode Wilderness and our website statistics are incredible. We’re actually leading our competitors in that area now as well.
Looking toward the future, our big focus is increasing our capacity because we know we’re going to struggle to meet demand.
I would definitely recommend Re:brand. By sitting out the services they delivered for us, you could really see the genuineness, the relationship, and the sense that they genuinely cared and wanted to help us succeed.
It never felt like they were worried about how many steps it took. They were just happy to take the steps and get us there, which was a really nice way to work.
I’ve definitely recommended Re:brand to quite a few friends and family. Anyone who’s got a business should constantly be looking at whether their brand is performing, and a good way to find that out is to actually get rebranded. Have a look at it.”
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