Fiordland Outdoors Co.

Businesses inevitably grow, evolve and change over time. For Mark and Christine Wallace, their business started off as one jet boat and a logo, later evolving into three thriving businesses. 

Getting back to the reason for being

Mapping out the brand architecture and defining values, creates a strong foundation for growth and evolution. 

The Fiordland Outdoors Company portfolio was home to three strong businesses that all offered outdoor experiences in Fiordland:
Fish Jet - Jet boat fishing, Mark Wallace Distinctive Fishing Experiences - Guided fly fishing and Fiordland Water Taxi - A remote water taxi service. Different in service offerings but all similar in many ways.

As demand in the new tourism market grew, new services were introduced and businesses absorbed. The task of managing the different brands and communicating service offerings within the existing structure was starting to become too rigid and limiting growth.

Mark and Christine have lived in Fiordland their whole lives. They are entrenched in the Fiordland lifestyle, and so passionate about their backyard its almost palpable. The design needed to capture this enthusiasm and genuine desire to share what they love.  

Closeness to a brand sometimes means its difficult to see clearly and know what way to move. No one knows your brand like you do. The value is created when this information can be extracted and then presented in a form to broadcast to your audience.

During the process of many early morning Skype conversations and workshops, we started to unravel and define what Fiordland Outdoors Co. is, and what makes them special within the market. It’s not just about the services they provide, this is a standard. We wanted to focus on the by-product, the personable interactions and memorable connections that are made. Fiordland Outdoors Co. is passionate, knowledgeable and genuinely invested in ensuring all of their guests come away with incredible memories - this is their value proposition.

'Journey to a place you remember' was then coined, along with a new streamlined brand architecture. This merged the 3 existing brands under a refined and progressed brand image for Fiordland Outdoors Co. 

With a solid brand direction and consumer insights, we were able to move onto a new digital strategy and website development.

Getting inside the heads of the audience, we needed to consider what they might expect to see and think about how they would be interacting with the site. Based on research and the discussions to date, we suggested a sitemap that focused on three user types. These centred around simplifying the trips offered and the systems around how they are categorised. 

We had the analytics from the existing four websites, so used this along with the new clearly defined values to create a stripped back, user-friendly platform.  

The intention of the website is to showcase Fiordland and educate the guests about what the destination has to offer in nature and experiences. By arming the user with valuable information, and a few booking buttons, we put them in the decision-making seat and positioned Fiorldland Outdoors Co. as your genuine and passionate local ally.

Mark and Christine Wallace were just awarded AWS Legal Fiordland Tourism Operator of the Year 2017 award. This is what Christine had to say about their success.

"Almost everything we've done didn't exist before, so we have had some quite rapid growth – starting from one jet boat in our home to building a base this year which now has three boats and four full time [staff]. We started off with Fish Jet, then we created our fly fishing brand, then we purchased a water taxi company ... we're starting to get traction out there now and it is a real pleasure to see it start to take off." 
"...our forward bookings are double what they were at this time last year for the season ahead, so conservatively we are quite optimistic for the season ahead. We've seen a huge increase in people coming here, mostly internationally ... about 60 percent of our market is Americans, and that market is just getting stronger and stronger."

Creating good business is collaborative 

A long time client of Harmonica
Brand positioning and strategy - Harmonica
Visual identitiy, art direction, digital strategy, UX, UI - Kate Moloney
Website build - Italics Bold
Copywriting - Sondre Sommerfelt 

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