KYSON DANA
This product launch was fun but hectic. We were up against a really short deadline, small budgets, and lots of questions but the team and I pulled together and made it happen. I’m super proud of everyone involved. Boosted has always been a single product brand (only one electric skateboard) but with this new launch, we’d be expanding our line to include 4 new boards. With that would come lots of repercussions to the website, branding, and the launch campaign.
With new boards came the opportunity to really go after different demographics. We defined who each board was designed for and really honed in our messaging and imagery to make sure that board felt catered just for them.
We decided that each board needed to have it’s own brand—a unique look and feel to seperate it from the others. The Boosted Mini was meant to feel like pop-art with bright splashes of color. The Stealth was to be high-end and moody with dark lighting and soft shadows.
I gathered a bunch of reference photos that we used to set up the lighting and really dictate the mood of the shoot. We worked with Michael David Rose in his studio and crafted the look that would become so iconic for Boosted’s product launch.
Coming up with the names of the boards was just as important as the look and feel of the branding. We spent a lot of time working on naming conventions that could build off the existing Boosted board, make the boards stand out in the market, and that be adapted to include future products as well. After much debate, lots of “no’s” for the legal department we settled on Boosted Mini S (short-range), Boosted Mini X (extended-range), Boosted Plus, and Boosted Stealth.
With the newly created product photography, names, and defined audiences, it was time to create all of the brand assets needed to launch. We aimed for a premium and refined look to all of the branding, manuals, and other product touch points.
Boosted’s website was built on an old Wordpress theme that had been hacked to death over the years. The actual shopping experience lived on Shopify on a subdomain and was mostly a duplicate of everything that existed on Wordpress. Updating pages was a pain and the user journey wasn't seamless either. We decide to use this launch as an opportunity to rebuild our website using a modern web stack.
We designed three new templates: homepage, category page, and the product page and teamed up with the good people at Underbelly to handle the dev work. We updated our brand typography from using three fonts to using one single font (Acumin) with a variety of weights and widths. This updated style guide, color palette, and typography really took our web presence to the next level and helped elevate the entire launch experience.
I must say, this part of the product launch was A LOT of work and we spent A LOT of sleepless nights jamming to meet the launch deadline. I’ve never been this tired my life but am super thankful for Hayden (Boosted) and Riley (Underbelly) for really putting in the work and making it happen.
We conceived a video that could be shot in a large warehouse. This would give us the opportunity to control the lighting (avoid bad weather) and get more playful than we’ve been able to in the past. Going over specs and walking viewers through how to use the product is the tech industry norm when it comes to product launch videos so we decided to do just the opposite: keep it mysterious and full of hype. We aimed to hook viewers and peak their interest and then sell them on the website, not in the video.
We teamed up with the crew at Werehaus and they helped bring the vision to life.
On the second day of the video shoot, I went out with the talent and created photos. We brought together a super fun crew of skaters and it was a lot of great watching them bring these boards to life.
We focused on showing the unique places you can go with an electric skateboard and kept fun as our mantra. We highlighted the size of the Boosted Mini and demonstrated what the new shape and kicktail could do the ride.
