The best-kept secret in eye protection: identity design and a go-to-market post-mortem

Translating someone else's strategy

The strategic positioning and the editorial line were entrusted to an American agency. That choice reflected a cultural caution management owned: aiming at the United States meant securing the look and feel and the voice and tone with people whose market it was.

My scope was therefore a precise one and I own it as such: transcribing that positioning into a graphic vocabulary, working from the moodboards the agency had signed off with the local teams. Working from someone else's strategy imposes a particular discipline, that of understanding the intent finely enough to make decisions about form that the author of the positioning never anticipated, without ever betraying it.

A crown arrived at by feel

The link to the parent brand was first handled through the most obvious route: keeping the Bollé Safety typeface unchanged, and stacking the two names. With that base laid down, a mark of BSSI's own still had to be found.

At the time, the crown did not appear in the Bollé Safety logo. It existed elsewhere, discreetly, engraved on the temple of certified frames as a mark of technical reassurance. I read that mark for what it was, a token of the level of protection, and decided to bring it back to the center of a shield-shaped crest, where it becomes the metaphor for the highest level of protection.

What I did not know when choosing it was that Bollé Safety had every intention of building on that historical code. Nobody told me. I worked my way by iteration toward a mark that the Bollé Safety rebranding would then install, a few months later, as the central pivot of its identity. I note it without any triumphalism, because the fact mostly deserves to be read the other way round: a strategic intent that goes untransmitted is paid for in groping around, and iteration eventually found what a single sentence would have given from the start.

A ridge of light to give it rigidity

The treatment of the mark rests on a detail that settles everything: the crown is cut into two facets of distinct tones, which simulates a central ridge catching the light.

The effect is a slight volume, almost imperceptible, but it changes how the crest reads. A flat shield reads as a pictogram; a shield that catches the light reads as an object, and suggests a rigidity the subject calls for. On an identity meant to talk about ballistic protection, that difference is not decorative.

A graphic language in camouflage

BSSI claimed to address the military, but it also targeted, identifiably though never stated, the general public. Those two audiences do not expect the same thing from an identity. The first is wary of anything that looks like a marketing operation; the second needs a distinctive mark to want to wear it.

The position taken was to design a graphic language in camouflage: functional and unadorned at first glance, in line with what the military world expects, but built on a duality that makes it desirable to anyone looking at it differently. The typography and the icon system hold the first register. The palette and the color accents in headlines hold the second, at an intensity the tactical world, generally desaturated, does not practice.

A challenger's line

The line "The best-kept secret in tactical eye protection" comes from the American agency and is part of the editorial line. It is worth pointing out for what it owns: a challenger stance, explicitly placing itself in Oakley's wake rather than pretending to ignore it. In a market where the competitor is American, widely established and an army supplier, claiming the status of best-kept secret is a way of turning a shortfall in awareness into an insider's promise.

What I cannot conclude

I cannot claim that this identity work succeeded, and I cannot claim the opposite either.

BSSI did not reach its objectives, but the identifiable causes sit elsewhere than in the branding. The European market, which knew Bollé Tactical and its products designed for European armed forces, did not necessarily follow a product strategy redirected toward the United States. Investment concentrated on D2C, a channel that was never a strong one for Bollé Safety. And the target market turned out to be structurally hard to enter, a subject developed in the study devoted to the MY6 campaign.

Delivering a verdict on the identity in an environment where several difficulties piled up would be a convenient reconstruction. I prefer to describe the decisions and leave the result to its ambiguity.