Articulating the Brand experience

Sulis’s brand makes clients feel supported in their health needs through pampering treatments. They will feel educated for life when they attend herb walks and workshops. They will be diagnosed when they have herbal medicines prescribed and when they are given thorough, holistic programmes to support them in their optimum body and nervous system health. In getting back to nature, nature’s ancient, worldly secrets will create a new lifestyle for your clients based around healing and full-body support.

A grounding and reassuring service full of care, and products from the wisdom of the earth.

Brand values and identity

This identity is knowledgeable, personal, approachable and high quality driven by a gentle passion for a deep connection with nature.

How and why we rebranded Sulis

Sulis is unique in that it offers the widest possible range of modalities, unavailable from the competitors. In offering herbal medicine, knowledge and tailored client packages, it cares strongly for the customer’s whole health and offers bespoke solutions to optimise for their needs.

After 7 years of operating as Sulis Aromatherapy, the business has evolved drastically and needed a rebrand. I did the original branding for aromatherapy massage services, which quickly grew to offer a wide range of globally-inspired and special, high-quality services. 

In subsequent years, the evolution of the brand, driven by Emily’s insatiable love of learning and drive for a diverse and rounded offer within her business, has made it grow in several directions. A move to offering products to B2B clients as well as B2C customers meant that soon beautiful body products and packages were being designed and sold. The need for the brand to work for both internal and external communications, on packaging and for events and workshops meant that the original logo and colour palette couldn’t service everything effectively.

Emily’s operations were grounding in further aromatherapy training and a degree in botanical herbalism to match her vision of being able to offer a completely holistic service that will address not just the needs of the body for relaxation, but also for health from the inside, and the wellbeing of being outside in nature. 

The new business structure 

Sulis Aromatherapy has evolved into Sulis as the umbrella with Sulis Aromatherapy, Sulis Botanicals and Sulis Apothecary below it. This enables all business areas of in-person events such as herb walks, apothecary services including herbal prescriptions and blending of herb teas and remedies, workshops, training and bespoke one to one packages to address individual client health problems.

Brand strategy and brand design for the whole holistic business

Supernature Marketing was engaged on a strategic brand level and for the design of the rebrand to complement it. I carried out strategic competitor mapping, the brand restructure and research. 

The aromatherapy product market is well established in the UK with well known organic brands selling through large retailers. One-woman founder, high-end brands and big companies hold trusted positions in the market (Neom, Aromatherapy Associates, Tisserand). Another route to market uses aromatherapists as sales agents (Do Terra, Neal’s Yard). These brands tend not to offer direct-to-customer services such as massage, and are primarily retail product brands.

While the aromatherapy massage side of the business needed to operate on a local marketing level, the product side of the business needed to be perceived in a way that could compete with high end and luxury products, to enable a reasonable profit for the volume of sales. It also needed to make the products desirable for other aromatherapists to use, and as a trusted brand to white label and sell through B2B networks. 

The brand positioning has been designed to move from the earthy and homemade towards the clinical side for a few reasons: to compete visually in the trendy apothecary area, to help with the perception of clinical services (prescriptions) and it needed to move upwards in terms of the quality it is seen as.

To address this we mapped the competitors and evaluated their price and branding strategies. 

A new brand colour strategy

We introduced a more contemporary and more colourful colour palette based on a colour strategy that links together apothecary, aromatherapy and body services with herbal botanicals so that there is a harmonious palette to pull everything together in an appealing and consistent way. Each service or product area has its own identity linked to that area of the business and there is now the flexibility to help with the range of distinct, yet unified marketing collateral for those different modalities. 

Warm, soft and balanced, gentle muted tones connect to the earth, to spices, herbs, bodies and to the health of the earth (organic). Quiet strength and a feeling of sophistication come from using tones that connect and sit in pleasing harmony.

Additional colours in the palette helps to link the seasonality in the marketing throughout the year so that the traditional pagan calendar events, moon cycles and other body-to-earth links can connect with ideas of the wisdom of the earth.

The colour strategy helps with the repositioning of the brand. By dropping the navy, we removed the subconscious link to Neal’s Yard who are at a lower price point, and we introduced a lot of white (in this case an off white) which helps to align nearer to the aspirational NEOM and This Works brands.

The visual output of the new branding means that the overall look and feel will be smoother and more minimal and will give a feeling of peace.

Keeping brand elements that align with the mission and vision of the business 

As a heavily female-based brand, the name Sulis is derived from Sulis Minerva the great British Celtic healer goddess, a solar and fertility deity whose shrine was located at Bath Spa. The Romans called her Minerva Medica (healing) or Sulis Minerva. She was a warrior dedicated to women’s rights and freedom. Depicted with her foot resting on an owl, her sacred bird, her themes were healing and medicine.

The feather in the logo symbolises strength, used in rituals and ceremonies it stands for spiritual protection. We kept the strapline ‘aromatherapy as light as a feather’ for the body services. 

Since drawing the original logo, not only did the business adapt and grow, requiring a new strategy, but also the style of lettering had become widely adopted by many  small businesses in a wide range of industries. It needed to change to reflect the customer demographic. A Sans Serif is used for clarity and cleanliness and a signature script shows the high quality, professional and personal level of attention within the business.

What’s next?

The new branding will be brought into line across all of its marketing assets. Because there is packaging to source and stock to sell through, there won’t be a hard launch for the rebranding but the digital assets will support the customer acquisition and retention and communicate this company’s diverse range of offerings.