Italic Pixel Design: Thinking | Strategy

Knolly Bikes
Noel Buckley (Knolly) designs and manufactures high end mountain bike frames. The frames ellicit a unique emotional paradox - the appreciation of superb workmanship, and the desire to get on the bike and push it within an inch of it's life.

Noel has been building bike frames since 2002. Knolly Bikes grew out of his dream to ride something better – something that was not currently offered in the mountain bike market place.

Project Profile
At the start, Knolly Bikes was never designed to be a business – it was only one person building himself a bike. But with a superlative frame design positive feedback from his peers, it rapidly became apparent that he had a product that could go to market - on a global scale.

Noel contacted ItalicPixel to create a brand for Knolly bikes.

Thinking
Knolly Bikes have a reputation of building superlative bikes, constructed from sound engineering principles using only the best available components and finished with immaculate care. Machined excellence. Engineered art.

Bike owners referred to the confidence inspiring abilities that the bike frame exhuded. From that we helped coin the call to action " Reilable, Predictable, Performance".

Strategy
Knolly Bikes is a premium brand. We decided to use a minimilistic approach to reflect this. Branding on the bike frames would be subtle and elegant - this would allow the bike frame to be the centrepiece. The refreshed brand was to be launched at Interbike 2006 - North America's largest bike tradeshow.

We set the following project goals:

• design a premium brand that illustrates the maturing of the Knolly Bike company
• develop an icon that would appear on the head tube of the entire knolly bikes range
• develope a set of flexible marketing materials (data sheets and a dealer pack)
• build a website that would showcase the frames as well as the knolly experience

Design
The engineered "K" logo captured the essence of the Knolly Bike brand. The elegant mark cast in grey, apears on the head tube of all knolly bike frames and is the symbols of engineered excellence. It is designed not to detract from the frame itself.

Haruki Noguchi supplied the product and action shots for the website and the marketing collateral. They captured the essence of the brand completely.

The website was rebuilt with a marketing focus. The main splash page gave visitors instant access to the lifestyle. CTA (calls to action) created short cuts to specific pages thorughout the site. The bike frames were married with action shots to showcase the unique abilities of each product.

Orange was used as the highlight colour on the website - this was the feature colour of the previous logomark. This allowed continuity from the previous identity.

Results
Knolly bikes was awarded the coveted MTBR Choice Award for the V-tach at Interbike 2006 - an outstanding result considering the competition from the bigger brands and their vast stable of products. His distribution kits have been sent as far as Australia and the growth in demand for Knolly Bikes is on the up and up.