Services Provided: Business Development Counsel, Brand Strategy, Tagline, Key Messaging, Graphic Design System, Brand Training, Training Curriculum Development, Internal Brand Activation, Responsive Website Design

2013 was a big year for the Canadian jewellery industry.

Bermuda-based Signet Jewelers acquired the Zale Corporation for $1.4 billion, Michael Hill and Pandora continued to make inroads, and Canadian jewellery sales reached over $7.1 billion. The industry was fragmented and opportunity was there for the seizing.

Meanwhile, Canadian national jeweller, Paris Jewellers was looking to gain market share.

From its humble beginnings as a goldsmith in St. Albert Centre in 1982, the family-owned and operated company continually refined its business model and quietly expanded to 28 stores across Canada. Combine an old-world work ethic and dedicated people who love what they do and you have a proven formula for success.

Paris Jewellers was successful. They knew with the right strategy they could be even more successful, but what they didn’t know was how to create the winning strategy to achieve their vision.

Paris set out to find an Edmonton marketing agency to help them.

After the big agency pitches for new creative and national advertising campaigns—Paris Jewellers selected Urban Jungle because of its specialization and unique “inside-out” approach to branding.

Tasked with guiding Paris Jewellers’ self-discovery, crafting the brand strategy, and activating it internally, Urban Jungle pushed through an intense series of discovery sessions, focus groups, and internal surveys.

Results in hand, Urban Jungle proposed a strategy to reposition Paris Jewellers as “the happy brand.”

Why happy? Because in a land of giants happiness was the one thing Paris could have a chance of owning. It couldn’t compete on price (nor did it want to). It couldn’t compete with multi-million dollar advertising budgets, expensive showrooms, infinite selection, celebrity endorsements, or hundreds of convenient locations. All Paris could control was the experience its customers would have when they walked through the door. The goal was 100% happiness.

It’s one thing to say it. It’s another to actually deliver on it.

How does one actually ensure 100% delivery of happiness? It seemed like a daunting task, but one we were up for. The approach called for a new and inspiring vision, a practical mission and a set of core values everyone truly believed in. Once the foundation was established, a positioning statement and key messages were crafted to communicate specifically what made Paris Jewellers unique.

Positioning soon evolved into the creation of a unique graphic design system aimed at carving out Paris’ visual niche.

Urban Jungle collaborated with its award-winning friends from Pulp Studios to design a primary and secondary colour palette, select fonts, as well as create a versatile livery pattern.

Using stunning creative to build from, Urban Jungle progressed to redesigning a responsive website theme and developing a brand training curriculum for management and staff.

Working with an Edmonton-based motion graphic studio, Urban Jungle illustrated, scripted, and recorded a series of five videos. The video series walked staff through the brand development process, communicating the vision and demonstrating how staff could bring the brand to life in their own unique way. A training curriculum accompanied the videos assuring a bigger return on investment and giving Paris Jewellers the capability to continue to consistently deliver effective training to staff long after Urban Jungle rode off into the sunset.

With activation underway, Paris management needed a way to bring its brand story to life.

Paris also needed a strategy to continually monitor the “happiness index.” For that Urban Jungle created a fun and easy-to-use measurement tool we affectionately called “The Big Book of Happiness.“

While brand and sales training combined with management policies and practices helped Paris Jewellers staff to meet their goals, the Big Book of Happiness was our approach to measuring the customers’ happiness. It’s much more than a beautiful booklet of lifestyle photography. It’s one of the most important tools in Paris’ branding arsenal, which will better equip the company to activate its core values, actualize its mission, and validate the effectiveness of its focus on customer service—ensuring all Paris Jewellers customers are happy with every purchase they make.