Belong Designs started in 2013 with 80 shirts and a line the founders wrote about what mattered to them: follow your passion, do what you love, find where you belong. Belong’s customers get outside in all kinds of ways: hiking backcountry trails, downhill mountain biking, a first camping trip with the kids. Belong sits comfortably between technical gear and everyday wear. Today, it makes outdoor apparel for everyday adventure, sold through its DTC site, retail stores, and a Faire wholesale channel.
Belong came to us with a contained ask: help the brand perform better in online advertising. The ads needed to grab attention, resonate, and convert. But when we dug a little deeper, we realized the ad performance was just a symptom of the real sticking point: Belong’s brand, the messaging, voice, and foundational identity, had moved them forward when they launched, but now it was holding them back.
We started with a small strategy pilot and a simple ask: walk us through the thinking behind the brand and its messaging. What we found, together, was that the brand hadn’t yet caught up to the product. The original messaging was broad enough to fit almost anyone, which made it hard for anyone in particular to choose Belong, pay more for it, or recommend it. In a category where good design and thoughtful features are now the baseline, Belong needed something distinct to stand for.
The answer was already in the brand: adventure is an outlook. Adventure was never really about the activity. It’s an outlook, a way of treating whatever comes next as something to enjoy and learn from, and an outlook doesn’t belong to an athletic standard. That idea was authentic to Belong all along.
We built the brand, then the site and the marketing, around that core idea. The brand foundation gave Belong a way to say it in every channel. The tongue-in-cheek message, “Adventure everywear,” put the idea on the clothes, in the voice of a supportive adventurer: confident, courageous, imaginative. The palette came straight from nature, anchored by a deep primary called Root, with accents that add energy and play so Belong feels premium, but still approachable.
The new Shopify site highlighted customers’ own stories on the homepage, and a manual with live training gave the team the tools to carry the concept forward. Email flows and social took the same idea into the places Belong meets new people, backed by a six-month growth advisory.
Belong saw revenue grow 70% in the year after the rebrand, and the first gains showed up within three months of the new site.
It started as a question about ads. It ended as an idea Belong can say everywhere: adventure isn’t an activity, it’s an outlook.
