Free The Birds, the independent brand elevation consultancy, is behind the branding, packaging and launch campaign for Roam – a new, contemporary men’s hair and beard styling range crafted by hair salon professionals.

Brand concept:
Free The Birds created the brand’s name, Roam, which strongly reflects its vision to widen every man’s horizons about his life and personal style. Roam is designed for the free-spirited man who is always ready for adventure. Because when someone is looking for the unexpected and the unexplored, they still want to look good while doing it, no matter where life takes them.

To bring this to life, Free The Bird’s designers created a strong and elegant, dark green and gold globe icon brand idenity. The colour palette is inspired by nature’s elements and the metallic finish a visual cue for quality. The brand world is designed to spread from the pack outwards: the name, identity and vision brought to life across packaging, in store, website and social media.

Campaign concept:
The brand vision is the inspiration for #adventuready – Roam’s launch campaign theme. Activated across Roam’s website and Instagram, the content, layered textures and a spacious editorial feel give the sense of an explorer’s journal or field notes. Product visuals convey a sense of place. Cinematic landscapes with absorbing horizons create wanderlust. Unified images are tiled across a sequence of three Instagram posts to reinforce scale, and animated to give a parallax effect.

Design concept:
Free The Birds designed the packaging for Roam’s five-strong product range: a pomade, a paste and a clay for the hair, a shampoo and a beard oil. Roam products are made and used by hair salon professionals with unrivalled haircare expertise. All products are designed to provide lasting finish, allowing them to be adventure ready and last the course.

Several visual devices have been employed to support the brand’s core theme. The brand mark, for example, is reminiscent of the Earth’s tilted axis and the same angle it features is used in photos and key visuals with the use of shadows or leaning models to echo the mark and strengthen brand recognition. Meanwhile, the Roam grid structure is square, like the structure of a map, so ideal for Instagram – a key engagement platform for the brand.

Joachim Schwartzbach, Vice-President of Roam’s brand owner, IC Scandinavia, said: “This is a new chapter for us. A brand-new brand with a unique personality. Everything around Roam speaks its own language and has its own look. It’s not just a brand, it’s a world.”

Paul Domenet, Communications Creative Director at Free The Birds, said: “Bringing Roam to life has been an energising experience for the whole team. We have created not just the brand itself but its persona across social media and in the real world. It’s ready to roam anywhere.

“Throughout, the guiding principle has been to give the brand room to react and grow as the market evolves – allowing Roam to keep pace with consumers who are always looking forward, always on the go,” Domenet adds.

Roam launches in Norway and Sweden this month ahead of Scandinavian Father’s Day on 7 November. There are also plans to take the brand global with a US launch in 2020.