Brand expression: Fun meets performance

Mons Royale (or “Mons” as they are affectionately known in mountain towns) built a brand on playful grit. From their earliest days, they were bold and bright, rooted in the story of two NZ farm kids who fell in love and wanted to bring sustainable, performance merino into their favourite sports. In recent years they pushed the brand deep into technical performance, and started to feel they’d lost the heart of fun that made Mons stand out in the earliest days. 

To really understand the heart of Mons, we spoke to long-time customers, staff and local riders at every level. The insights gathered gave us a solid platform and just the right guardrails to craft a brand story, pillars and voice that are truer to the Mons product and community. It marked a shift back to fun and a celebration of New Zealand’s quirks. Their brand personality—Gritty, Chill, Radical, Cheeky—sums this up perfectly.

The brief to the brand

With a solid narrative and framework in place, we created a playbook for execution: articulating how the brand shows up in campaigns, in retail (owned and wholesale), in community activations and on product. Key considerations? Ensuring the brand expression will work in both a regional and global context, prioritizing women, and shifting the rider mindset from synthetic to natural fibres—without leaning too heavily into a sustainability story.  Every touchpoint needed to ladder back to grit and fun while showing the product’s incredible performance. 

Alongside the international Mons leadership team, we hosted a day-long workshop in Squamish, BC, exploring how the brand expression shows up in each of their purviews. We pressure-tested and refined the brand together, ensuring we had a foundation that could last.

Brand R+D: From the store to the summit

Having that kind of universal alignment makes it easy to go all in on concepts. As the pinnacle of our work together, we applied our Brand R+D process to three key initiatives:

1. How the brand expression will live in Mons’ always-on marketing

2. How the brand expression will show up in the new Wanaka flagship store

3. Creative direction for Mons’ 2025 Bike Collection launch

We pulled out the creative stops, rooted in all the consumer insights we’d gathered at the outset of our work together. When the Wanaka store opened in late 2023, it was a perfect capsule of the brand—both showing and telling the ethos of Mons with a balance of fun and performance, and a distinctly Mons voice.

CREDITS

Photography: Mons Royale