From Standalone Stoner Stalwart to Cannabis Retail Giant
FRIENDLY STRANGER
The Friendly Stranger was an iconic and trusted supplier of accessories to heavy grey market cannabis users in Toronto – the Cannabis OG – until it was acquired in 2017 by investment bankers with the grand aspiration to franchise across Canada as a legal cannabis retailer.
Simple in theory and complex in execution, the challenge was that any existing brand elements were linked directly to the founders and identified with the grey market community. We needed to reshape the Friendly Stranger brand so that it could connect with consumers across Canada and needed to shape the cannabis consumer retail experience and path to purchase.
We worked with the Friendly Stranger to attack the two phases of the project in parallel paths, working against an incredibly tight timeline before the flagship grand opening. The first phase - (re)building and (re)positioning the brand to achieve three key objectives:
Ensure compliance with ever evolving government regulations.
Pay homage to the brands heritage and legacy equity in the cannabis space without losing or alienating current consumers.
Establish a brand that would resonate with the next generation of cannabis consumers, ushering them into the legal market in an authentic and credible way.
For the second phase – complete with a new and improved brand identity -- we built out a retail design and experience toolkit for the flagship store and subsequent franchisees, which included everything from complete elevation and CAD drawings, to 3D renderings of the consumer journey and product placement, a store launch campaign playbook complete with experiential marketing efforts, and in-store signage and POS, staff training manuals and digital content to support the store launches. It was a successful and total retail brand launch that catapulted Friendly to the very top of the crowded and saturated cannabis retail environment in Canada.
Campaign Strategy | Art Direction | Copywriting | Studio Production | Front End Development
