Deliverables:
- Brand strategy
- Brand identity
- Brand guidelines
Breakthrough goal:
Relaunch a new offer
Faced with intensifying online competition and a business model heavily reliant on a single trading season, Festive Lights needed to reimagine its brand to unlock sustainable, year-round growth. While the business had already begun evolving its product offer beyond Christmas, its brand identity had not kept pace.
The challenge was clear: shift perceptions, broaden relevance, and create a distinctive brand that could emotionally connect with consumers and trade audiences alike – at any time of year.
Ambition
Founded in 1999 as a specialist Christmas lighting retailer, Festive Lights had grown into a successful national e-commerce business. However, the rise of competitors offering broader decorative lighting ranges exposed a strategic vulnerability: selling products associated almost exclusively with one moment in the calendar was no longer viable.
In response, Festive Lights expanded its offer. A new ‘Home’ range to reposition the business as an all-year-round decorative lighting provider, followed by the launch of a dedicated ‘Trade’ proposition supplying lighting at scale to installers, event professionals and distributors. While these moves were gaining traction, our consumer research revealed a persistent challenge. Customers rated product quality and customer service extremely highly, yet the brand remained firmly associated with Christmas. For most people, Festive Lights was still the ‘Christmas lights company’ – purchased once a year, then forgotten.
To fully deliver on the new business strategy, the brand itself needed to change.
Strategic direction
A comprehensive brand audit highlighted a fragmented identity. Visual styles varied widely across touchpoints, limiting recognition and diluting brand equity. To build trust and consistency, Festive Lights needed a cohesive identity system that could flex confidently across B2C and B2B audiences, while also injecting personality into a highly competitive category.
Crucially, the strategy needed to rebalance revenue by addressing the heavy seasonal skew in sales. Insight from our ClarityLab™ brand strategy sessions reinforced that this was not simply a product problem, but a perception problem. Festive Lights had to move beyond being associated with a single event and instead connect with how lighting makes people feel.
This reframing led to a new strategic focus: lighting as an emotional enhancer. Not lights for Christmas. Lights for moments, moods and everyday life.
The breakthrough idea
The breakthrough came through defining a new short and simple brand essence: Joy.
Joy captured the emotional benefit Festive Lights brings to people’s lives – the simple pleasure of beautifully lit spaces, shared experiences and uplifted moods. From this, we articulated the brand proposition: ‘illuminating spaces, lighting up faces’. A line that speaks as much to emotion as it does to product.
This idea became the driving force behind the entire brand experience. A new logo introduced a subtle ‘smile’, reinforcing the emotional core of the brand. A vibrant, optimistic colour palette replaced the muted tones of the past, while photography shifted away from product-only shots to scenes of people enjoying the atmosphere created by the lighting itself.
From packaging and website design to messaging and tone of voice, every touchpoint was reimagined to deliver delight, consistency and warmth – ensuring the brand made customers smile at every interaction.
The breakthrough result
The refreshed brand successfully reframed Festive Lights in the minds of consumers. No longer seen solely as a Christmas retailer, the business became associated with lighting that enhances mood and atmosphere all year round.
This perception shift drove a significant uplift in sales of all-year-round lighting products, helping to smooth revenue across the calendar and support long-term growth. More importantly, Festive Lights emerged with a distinctive, emotionally resonant brand platform – one capable of supporting both consumer and trade audiences, and lighting the way for the next stage of the business’s evolution.
