Ickle Bubba: brand strategy and creative direction to fuel a baby brand’s global expansion
✦
“Brand is the starting point of any decision a business makes. When you truly know what your brand is, its strengths and what it offers your customer, it’s easy to validate your decisions. The brand has become our strategic compass.”
— Emma, Marketing Director at Ickle Bubba
The brief
Ickle Bubba have a goal to be a leading global baby brand.
They want to offer great products for all people, on all budgets, and needed help in connecting with the parents-to-be who really ‘got’ them.
They’d only been in business for 7 years when we got together to discuss their brand. Having grown quickly, they’d never had the chance to work on telling the story of who they are, and in a crowded marketplace, this was becoming crucial. We started what became a rebrand project by auditing the brand and their industry to understand how to proceed.
The Ickle Bubba brand before the brand refresh
The challenge
Standing out in a crowded market
Ickle Bubba had momentum, a growing team, and big plans but no plan in place for their brand that would support their next stage of growth. Their identity wasn’t clearly defined, which made it hard to create cohesive campaigns or communicate what made them truly different.
Like many fast-growing start-ups, their early focus was on sales. But with plans to expand globally and build a stronger connection with their audience, they knew it was time to invest in their brand so they could continue to see the success they had experienced over the last year or so.
In such a crowded market, Ickle Bubba had to be clear on what they stood for – and make sure their audience knew it too.
I supported them to:
Develop a clear and cohesive brand identity to strengthen their growth plans
Clarify their positioning in a crowded marketplace
Connect more meaningfully with parents-to-be
Evolve their visual and verbal identity to better reflect who they are and what they stand for
Build a brand that would shape marketing, internal culture and customer perception
Audit and analysis
Being Ickle Bubba
We began with a brand audit, understanding their customers, and a global market analysis to identify where the sat in their industry, where they wanted to be, and know how to get there. This helped uncover gaps between the team’s ambitions and how the brand was showing up in the market.
We examined competitors, did a gap analysis to ensure they were operating in the best space and got to the core of why the business exists. We didn’t just do this in the UK, we explored it globally to sense-check how they’re perceived in each market they operate in.
We also reviewed and evaluated their existing brand visuals and assets to build the brief for building on their creative direction going forward. Alongside this, we conducted research into parents around the world to shape the brand’s positioning.
Brand strategy and pillars
The brand growing up
With a solid vision for the future and their brand strategy in place, we embarked on translating that into Ickle Bubba’s personality. It wasn’t just a case of putting some slick visuals with it all. We needed to communicate what they stand for through their visuals as well.
Using insights from the audit and customer research, we defined a brand strategy that clarified their purpose, positioning, and personality. We identified what the business stands for and how it should show up internally and externally in a brand workshop with key stakeholders, and the brand’s proposition evolved from there.
Part of this work involved identifying brand pillars - key themes that thread through everything the brand does, from product development to communication. Their strategy outlines how the brand operates at a global level and how to communicate with their customers.
Brand identity development
Evolving their creative direction
I then supported Ickle Bubba’s team to implement the brand, working closely with them to develop a strong photography style, set out how the brand appears on product, on their digital channels and how their visuals and messaging work together throughout their brand comms, while still enabling them to be flexible and recognisable.
How I supported their rebrand:
Refined their visual identity, making sure it aligns with their brand pillars and positioning
Developed a distinctive photography style to bring personality to the brand while showcasing product at its best
Defined a visual identity that enables the brand to be consistent and have personality
Ensured brand consistency across products, digital platforms, and campaigns
Collaborated with the internal team to implement and embed the creative direction into day-to-day brand activity
“We have doubled sales on certain products in fallow months, which suggests the newly branded campaigns we are running have an impact on consumer buying behaviour without the need for a promotion. This is a direct reflection of the power of our creative campaign execution and clear brand messaging that originated from the rebranding exercise.”
The rebrand outcome
A journey of development
The new brand has repositioned Ickle Bubba in their market and the consistency in the brand execution and strong visuals with a powerful palette has really helped them to stand out.
Ickle Bubba now have:
Improved sales performance: doubled product sales in slower months, without discounts
Increased brand consistency: unified look and feel across all channels and products
A brand playbook: a clear framework for the team to make decisions, bringing them clarity on who they are and how to show up
Clearer customer targeting: a stronger connection with the right audience, and growing market share
Global readiness: a brand strategy that flexes across international markets
Confident brand leadership: their brand is used to guide marketing and business decisions
A foundation for growth: their strategy now shapes products, hiring, and business direction
“The rebrand was needed to support the growth of the business, not only in the UK but also globally. Fliss understood exactly what we wanted to deliver and even in our initial conversation we were drawing out ideas and concepting how the new brand would take shape. She gave us the building blocks to engineer a cohesive, well-thought-out brand.”
Design support from No. 52 Design and the Ickle Bubba creative studio