Olivia le Roux

So, what was going on at KatKin before you decided to go through the brand story development process?

In the start-up world, time is of the essence. We’d done some workshopping internally, word association, and traditional customer profiling. That worked for us for a long time, up until the point that we met Sonder & Tell. But we came to a point where we had this almost enraging flame inside us – we knew what KatKin was, who our audience was and how to speak to them. And the cat food industry is quite bland, we knew we wanted to be different. We knew we needed to get the team kind of fired up on something that is just like shooting paint at a wall. And here we are.

In the repositioning, the brand revolves around the Hardcore Cat Parent. What does it mean to you?

When Sonder & Tell coined “hardcore cat parent” in a presentation, the entire room got goosebumps. It was exactly what we were trying to communicate about who our customer was. Being a cat parent is hardcore within itself and being someone that’s going to love an animal that might bite you back, or not give you back the same level of care, love and attention sometimes feels like a one-way door kind of love. But you continue to love that animal with absolutely everything in you.

The amazing thing about working at a company like KatKin is that internally we are hardcore cat parents, and we attract hardcore cat parents. It felt like a kismet moment where we were like: “Yep, I see myself in this customer persona we’re creating”.

There’s a hardcore cat parent in every single cat parent out there, whether they wear diamonds or dungarees, there’s something extremely hardcore about loving an animal with claws.

And how have you seen the idea of ‘hardcore cat parents’ come to life in your day-to-day?

Hardcore cat parents are at the core of our brand mission and vision. We call them “CPs”. Every decision we make, every post we create, every line of copy we write, we think: is this really going to speak to that super fan that we have? Every time we’re trying to create something, we come together as a team and think about how we can personalise it and how we can centre them as the hero in the story.

We have an incredible audience. We’ve got our customers, and then we’ve got our super fans which are about 20-30% of people but they’re so wonderfully engaged with our brand. They go completely out of their way to let us know what they think about absolutely everything that we do.

It’s our job to take all the valuable feedback and make a better-informed decision in-house. Bundle it up in a much more concise, beautiful way. That’s a better marriage of what the brand wants and what the customer wants.

How would you give smaller brands the confidence to go bolder with messaging?

In every presentation we had with the Sonder & Tell team, our smiles got bigger and bigger. We believed so much in what we were trying to do and they brought it to life in a way that really enthused us. If we were at an eight, it took us to a 15.

The interesting part was presenting it back to the team. It’s all well and good knowing what we want to do as a business and what we want our brand to be. But practically, how do you implement that across departments and get everyone using the tools? And we’ve got an incredible tone of voice strategy that Sonder & Tell helped us put together. For us, it’s like a bible within the creative team. We have it open on our screens almost every single day. It’s called the CLAW and we constantly reference back to it.

As our brand grows, it’s important to understand how to flex the tone and how to lean into the different things you’re trying to say. KatKin as a brand is quite bold but it’s underpinned by values, mission and a single-minded message that lands with customers in a way that invites them into the conversation and creates a safe space for them to see themselves in the brand. That shows them that we mean it when we say we’re putting cats first. Cats are the underdogs and don’t have as much research into them. Fortunately for us, that gives us a massive play-field of how much we can talk about. And then depending on the platform that we’re on or the topic that we’re talking to, we can be more cat. And have a little bit of a zoomie with what we want to say.

As a designer, how have you felt about doing a story-first approach?

Bringing KatKin to life felt so natural. We were asking: how do we not be fluffy with what we’re doing? When you’re a startup direct-to-consumer brand, you’ve got quite a big ball to play with of brands that fall into your category.

Our bold strategy and bold tone of voice together create this rallying cry that brings everyone together and makes space for cat people to be who they are. Bringing that to life visually was just about as fun as you can imagine. We’re still discovering so much and flexing what that can look like. There are just endless opportunities to question: what is on the horizon for us as a brand?

And how do you agree on a big, bold, single-minded story when there are multiple stakeholders with different opinions?

At KatKin, we often look at everything from every angle. And when going through the strategy, rebrand and even visuals, alignment came naturally. We stress-tested it within the team to make sure we felt strongly about certain directions – that it wasn’t just an emotional response but could go beyond the room at that moment. And it came down to asking: what is the purpose of what we’re trying to do? What’s our vision as a brand, and does this bring that to life? If the answer’s a no, we find another way.

At KatKin we nurture a healthy environment of speaking candidly with one another and people we work with externally – it’s collaborative. There’s no denying that we all stand behind what we’re trying to do as a company. And when there is that single-hive mind mindset within a company, it’s really easy for us to stop and reassess as a team. To think about what we’re all trying to do. So we can decide to get together and make sure we’re getting there together.