Hogeye Digital Marketing Overhaul
Through a 3-phase project, we worked with the Hogeye team to redesign their visual identity, clarify the company’s unique position in the market, and bring them up to speed with a modern website and scalable infrastructure for future digital marketing initiatives.
Introduction
Hogeye Incorporated is a custom promotional products company based in Fayetteville, Arkansas. The company has been in business since 1982, and offers a wide array of products includes lapel pins, patches, decals, and more.
The company has decades of experience selling and marketing through traditional channels (print, direct mail, trade shows, phone), but needed some help making the jump to digital.
Over the years, they’d had a WordPress website, and more recently a Squarespace website, but the company was looking for a team that specializes in digital to turn it into an asset that meaningfully contributed to the company’s bottom line.
Hogeye wanted to reach existing customers more effectively – but more importantly, they wanted to reach new customers outside of their traditional network.
Where Blur Came In
Hogeye got in touch with us to talk about redesigning the Squarespace site they’d recently launched. After our initial discovery process, we realized we could provide much more value to the company by addressing the underlying strategic issues when it comes to digital marketing, instead of simply cleaning up the website.
Our proposal consisted of three sequential phases:
1. Digital Strategy
Objective: build a strong digital marketing foundation for reaching new customers, and increasing engagement for existing customers
2. Visual Identity
Objective: give the company a refreshed look to appeal to new audiences while respecting the company’s history and culture
3. Website Development
Objective: surface the company’s diverse product line in a clean, easy-to-navigate experience
Phase 1: Digital Marketing Strategy
Research
Hogeye had well established sales processes for traditional channels (print catalogs, trade show appearances, phone sales, etc). In contrast, digital was a blank slate.
We delivered a strategy plan with specific objectives and tactics for the following channels:
Social Media
Primary objective: increase brand awareness
SEO/Organic Web
Primary objective: build a reputation as product experts, build brand authority
Primary objective: keep customers engaged with the brand
Phase 2: Visual Identity
Requirements
The Hogeye visual identity was essentially undefined at the beginning of this project. There were no brand guidelines or consistent recommendations for look and feel, aside from including the company’s original logo.
We wanted to pay homage to the heritage of the company and respect its origins as a family owned sign shop in Hogeye, Arkansas, while giving it a distinct look that would appeal to new audiences.
We came up with the following requirements for Hogeye's new visual identity:
Maintain a sense of place, respecting the company’s heritage as a Northwest Arkansas based, family owned enterprise
Celebrate the artistic creativity that has been part of the company’s DNA since its founding
Keep an approachable and friendly attitude that reflects the company’s laid back and customer-oriented culture
At this point, we were ready to start exploring visual options and art direction in the design process.
Art Direction: Moodboard
We started the design process by brainstorming several creative directions and creating a mood board. We collected inspiration and references clustered around the following art directions / styles:
Retro Athletics / Outdoor
This direction lends itself to iconic characters and mascots, while making a nod to Hogeye’s location in the hometown of the Arkansas Razorbacks.
Modern Athletics & Motion
This is similar to the “retro collegiate / retro outdoor” direction in spirit, but with a distinctly modern aesthetic and sharper geometry (think pro football logos and mascots).
Pop Art / Comic Book
This direction was directly inspired by our interactions with the Hogeye team, seeing some internal merchandise like team tee shirts that featured comic book style artwork.
Legacy / Historical
The old logo was an interpretation of a coat of arms, featuring a hog within a shield layout. This direction explored more explicitly leaning into this inspiration rather than away from it.
Mystical / Magical
While researching the company and getting familiar with its history, we learned the backstory of the sculpture in front of the company office and its fictional origin as a magician transformed into a dancing hog.
Expressive Typography
The core idea here was that a more abstract mark would lend itself to more applications as the brand grew. Ultimately, it failed to meet the requirements we developed during the research phase.
Visual Identity Execution
Ultimately, we leaned into the “retro collegiate / outdoor” direction, as it felt like the best fit for the spirit of the company, while also allowing us to deliver on the requirements.
We developed a character-based logo reminiscent of collegiate mascots, and iterated on the design until it felt right. We completed the look with a hand-rendered wordmark to form the complete logo.
Logo, color palette, and type pairing
In addition to the logo, we developed guidance around color and typography, creating a new color palette and choosing a type pairing that felt creative, yet professional, with an emphasis on legibility in digital applications.
Phase 3: Website Development
Strategy
Due to the highly custom nature of Hogeye’s offerings, a full blown e-commerce website was too heavy of a lift for the scope of this project.
Instead, we chose to implement a digital catalog site, with a custom quote form that allows customers to submit art files with their quote requests. From there, sales and product experts take over.
Implementation
Once aligned on the strategy for the website, we got to work on building a SvelteKit-powered site on top of the Prismic CMS. This combination of tools is highly performant and provides flexibility to add new products and page content as needed without code changes.
It’s also open to extension in the future, so that if and when the Hogeye team is ready to introduce more automation in the quoting/ordering process, we have a solid foundation to build upon.
This implementation plan let Hogeye continue to do what they do best (customer service and advising on product design), while providing a new way for customers to engage with the company and lowering the barrier to entry for new customers.
Supporting Efforts: Socials and Email
While the core work was executed on the visual identity and website, we also executed a content shoot for social media. We captured images and video of products and Hogeye’s production process to create social media posts and provide content for email marketing.
We also laid the foundation for email marketing by setting up a Mailchimp integration to start retargeting past customers with a periodic newsletter.
These additional channels will be activated in unison with the website to execute synchronized multi-channel campaigns.
Results
The Hogeye team was thrilled with the outcome of the project overall, with the new logo quickly appearing on team hoodies and company packaging. Anecdotally, the logo was well received, with many customers and partners complimenting the new look.
A social media content calendar was created and shared with the Hogeye team as part of the ongoing effort there, and analytics data was collected for the first time from the website.
Our first two full months of analytics data show increasing traffic month over month and quickly improving performance in search compared to initial benchmarks. The new art file submission feature has streamlined Hogeye’s quoting process, leading to faster turnarounds.
Next Steps
Utilizing Google Search Console and Analytics to review the site’s traffic, our team has already identified opportunities to grow Hogeye’s reputation as product and service experts by creating new pages and content that anticipate customer questions and shopping intent.
We plan to synchronize the content and messaging across channels (socials, email, site pages) to maximize the impact of each effort, focusing on providing helpful information and context for customers who are just beginning their journey to find a custom promotional products partner.