Help a beloved Belgian brand embrace its past so it can envision an international future. From strategy to e-commerce.
During the past decade, J&JOY’s focus was to develop a clothing collection for the whole family. Investing mainly in their product design and quality (the rational aspects of the brand) which they learned to master.
With ambitions like national development, international expansion as well as federating new team members, the foundations were missing. To stand out as a brand, they had to uphold values.
Our mission was to help them transcend functional benefits and develop the emotional aspects of the brand in a full rebranding.
We helped the team redefine their purpose first, rework their pitch, set up the strategy and then redesigned the brand's visual assets.
Identifying J&JOY’s legitimate vision and shining light on the company’s ambitions, helped us rekindle their passion for travel. They had already been designing their collection following inspiration from different destinations and cultures all around the world but lacked the perspective to realize that it was a major drive in how they approached clothing design.
Their purpose became simple: J&JOY offers moments of evasion. The brand acts now as a window on a destination: translating travel inspirations into products, content and any other touch-points.
Our greatest achievement during our collaboration with J&Joy was to give the team the resources to recreate synergy within the departments. (re)Branding the company led to the optimisation of the creative processes and brought them together around a single focus.
Partially due to our intervention (we have to be honest here, the team did this), J&Joy successfully raised 1,6M € in investments to open 10 new flagship stores and convinced several online marketplaces like Zalando, Spartoo, and La Redoute to partner up.
« We’ve never had so much synergy between us. With Nemesis intervention we’re now way more efficient internally. The team has a renewed creative drive, the communication is fluid and my job is easier now that I know to focus on our narrative and the big idea of offering moments of evasion. »
Pierre Hamblenne
CEO, J&JOY
The team is now rechallenging its ways of working in a clearer context, more consistently and legitimately. Armed with a brand new identity, J&Joy now has all the requirements to overcome its initial challenges and achieve its goals.
For J&JOY, the main issues started to show after several members of the team left the company and were replaced by newcomers. Staff turnover is often synonymous with knowledge loss, slowdown in performance and confusion in leadership.
On top of that, the market’s brand perception was that it was an out-of-date brand (but not vintage) known as the “colourful polos clothing company”. This lack of interest by the public manifested in a constant decrease in their annual revenue over the last 3 to 5 years, forcing the company to focus on discount sales to attract clients and clear their inventory.
So, how to better J&JOY’s brand image? How to create a brand strategy that’ll federate clients and employees alike? And how to help the business get its revenue back on track?
“Sorry but… you’re not a brand!”
These were the first words we said to Pierre Hamblenne, CEO of J&JOY.
Brands have a point of view, they take a stance, they evolve in a clear universe, and they are relatable so people can assimilate the brand into their ways of living. J&JOY had been that at one point, but now J&JOY was just a product, a good product… but today it’s not enough anymore.
We had left Pierre unsettled and curious about how branding could help his brand. He took ─what we later discovered was─ a leap of faith and decided to put his trust in us. In the days following this first conversation, we were given a desk inside the J&JOY’s offices and official J&JOY email addresses.
Drag
Discovery sessions
We started talking with all the people in the company. The goal was to dive deep in the culture of J&JOY and find: What’s linking these people? What’s their drive? What do they believe the brand's purpose is?
The first month was focused on interviews, several workshops in small committees, daily coffee discussions, gathering customer feedback and completing the extended analysis of all the content created since the beginnings of J&JOY. All of this helped us have a solid understanding of the business, the brand, the team and the related issues.
What did we uncover?
The immersion helped us understand the causes underlying the gaps between the team, the business and their clients:
Important note: Since the rise of wholesalers such as Amazon, La Redoute and Zalando... 30% of their physical retailers have gone bankrupt in the last 3 years. (After internal J&JOY information)
Working hand-in-hand with the team and management, the challenges facing J&JOY were brought to light. Then, with the CEO, we defined the missions around our discoveries, some of the most important being:
To support and execute these missions, we first needed to build the brand foundations, bring the brand narrative out and formulate the brand purpose.
« I truly believe the rebranding has helped us immensely to grow as a team and gain maturity. I appreciated the most the fact that Nemesis has taken the time to identify what wasn’t going well inside the company and the teams. You guys took the time to establish a proper communication between the team-members and Pierre (CEO) so we could find adequate solutions and start anew. Today we’re confident in our role inside the company, we feel proud to be part of J&JOY (thanks to our new look) and we know how to face incoming problems as one. »
Adiola Baho
Finance & Accounting, Makisu
A New Icon, with (close to) infinite potential
Co-created with the textile designers of J&JOY, it represents the 2 J’s of J&JOY. It allows an infinite number of possibilities depending on the destination and meeting their needs to play with it.
To be honest, it was an arbitrary choice to put it sideways, a compromise made with the designer so it is not “basically, just 2 J’s”.
The colors
In designing apparel, J&JOY gives its point of view on destinations. Using black and white as the brand colors serves the “neutral” position adopted by the team. Letting the destinations reveal colors they use in their collections (seasonal colors), because discovering places and cultures inspires not only patterns but colors too.
Iconography
The visual language comes with an icon pack, inspired by the airports, transportation and associated codes.
« For me, personally, the impact from this year of collaboration with Nemesis is mostly human. You took the time with everyone from our team and helped us take a step back on our work and the company as a whole. At the time, we were overwhelmed, not knowing clearly why J&JOY existed. You gave us the boost we needed and helped us reinvent ourselves. The new direction our brand has taken suits us way better, our universe is now clear and we’ve regained enthusiasm in creativity. »
Olivier Araghi
Stylist Men & Boys, J&JOY
J&JOY is a point of view, a window on destinations. Its purpose is the transmission of travel stories. The team’s approach is therefore to bring these stories to life through clothing for the client to understand them.
To accompany the roll-out of the brand's visual identity on physical supports, we explored the digital realm in collaboration with the in-house marcom department. The real challenge was to mutualise information between departments. Making sure the initial intention from the stylist could perspire through brand communications and reach the end customers.
Building on the momentum, we completely reworked the whole User Experience and User Interface of J&JOY's website. Keeping up with the best practices in e-commerce and online sales. The goal was to allow the digital experience to serve the company's bottom line and not be an obstacle to cart completion (as it was before).
And the results speak for themselves. In the first year, the website experimented :
We’re one chat away to the start of an amazing brand transformation.
Hit us up!
