Ding! Bikes are Ready to Ride
One really fulfilling aspect of my work in brand design is the experience of helping to create or grow a local business. The ding bikes.com website is getting ready to launch in a few days, so I thought I'd share the story of how the brand came to be...
[This post was originally written for the thinkthoughts.net blog on Oct. 10, 2011. Go there to see more great work from the awesome Think Creative, Inc. team!]
Remember the feeling of riding your very first bike? Fresh air and the freedom to go anywhere you wanted. That’s the feeling our clients wanted to evoke with their new bike and trike retail concept. The family-owned business had targeted active seniors as an untapped market for sturdy, comfortable trikes and bikes. In their unique service model, they planned to bring the store directly to senior communities in the form of a truck and trailer, and host fun, interactive sales events. We were tasked with creating a brand that would make attending these events, and riding away on a brand new trike or bike, a can’t-miss experience.
The Frank Sinatra Generation
For inspiration, we turned to the era when these customers would have been kids riding their first bikes: the 1950s.
photo: ridesabike.tumblr.com
This generation admired Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack. They were (and are) imaginative and star struck with old Hollywood, but also sentimental about family and country. A deep need for togetherness makes them inclined toward mass movements and group activities. This group wouldn’t go in for your average sales demo, but they would probably be thrilled with the idea of group rides and a community event! We knew that the fact that the bikes themselves were made in America – manufactured by Worksman Cycles in New York – would be an important selling point too.
Step Aside or Join the Ride
A brand personality began to take shape: welcoming, inspirational, timeless yet fresh, quirky and carefree. Now we just needed a name that best evoked that personality. The clients were torn between two favorite contenders: Ding! or Cherry. So, to help them decide we embarked on a logo exploration for both options.
In the end, they picked Ding!, a name with dual meaning. First, it’s a childhood nickname for one of the owners. For a family-owned company, letting customers in on a little detail like this reinforces the feeling we are trying to evoke with the brand – personal, unique, familiar and fun. Ding! also evokes the sound of a bell – i.e. the sound of a bike coming through. Ding! is an announcement that something cool is happening. Something worth paying attention to. They can either step aside or join the ride, but either way Ding! will not be ignored.
We brought the brand to life by creating individual personalities for each bike, a custom color palette inspired by 50s style, and bright yellow brand decals for the bikes.
We then captured the Ding! lifestyle in an outdoor photo shoot with some daring camera work to get those action shots. For future reference, trikes are very handy to have on set. The photography style was inspired by glamorous old black and white photos of movie stars riding bikes, like the ones on ridesabike.tumblr.com. (This also helped us get around the fact that the bikes in the custom Ding! colors hadn’t arrived yet.)
The Ding! yellow really pops against the black and white photography, and with a primarily black, white and yellow palette we designed a suite of collateral materials that feels at once modern and nostalgic, just like the Ding! brand.
We also designed the truck and trailer that function as Ding!’s primary retail outlet and moving billboard and provided the Ding! team with business cards featuring quirky job titles, like “Chief Wheelie Popper.”
The sales experience for Ding! Bikes had to be multi-sensory, community-oriented and most of all FUN. In collaboration with our clients, we designed a plan for The Ding! Fling that features test rides, a Bring Your Own Bike tire service, and free ice cream served out of an old fashioned ice cream trike, just like the one the Good Humor man rode…which was also made by Worksman. The Ding! Fling gives customers a taste of Ding! Bikes’ full service experience, just like the good old days.
The business has already evolved to include a second target market of young urban commuters, and we’re proud that the brand we’ve created is just as relevant to this audience. What’s nostalgic to the older market is just retro enough to appeal to the younger group! Now we’re hard at work on the website and the Ding! sales team is setting up their first Ding! Flings at communities around Central Florida.
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