Into the Wylde
Brand strategy & messaging
Write about a vegan sexual lubricant for girls that’s good for thrush only we can’t say thrush? Brand design in London is never dull!
Kathie – founder of Into the Wylde, has been developing her product for the good part of five years and entrusted us with giving it a voice, a snappy tagline and some on-pack copy that reframes attitudes to thrush, without directly saying thrush (regulations, schmegulations)
Here’s how we ‘reawakened play’ with vulva lovin’ care….
client: Into the Wylde
Deliverables: Verbal identity, tone of voice, copywriting, brand positioning and strategy
Creatives: Siena Dexter – Strategy, copywriting. Illustration and packaging design: Claire Hartley Studios, Photography: Tara Liondaris
year: 2019
Press: Packaging of the World
Kathie Bishop – a medical herbalist specialising in female intimate health, founded Into the Wylde with the mission to create a lubricant brand for women, made specifically with women’s physical needs in mind, and not just from a product point of view. A vulva is not a penis, it has very different needs, and mimicking natural lubricant is about more than just making things slippy. A female lubricant product must work on a psychological, emotional level – connecting with women visually and verbally through the brand design and communication. And so, Into the Wylde set out to cross the slippery category of fem-care with a lubricant that gets women’s needs, inside and out.
Our brand tone of voice and messaging was inspired by Founder Kathie’s straight-talking tone and journey to creating the brand. Suffering for years with thrush, Kathie found the condition disconnected her from her intimate expression. The tone of voice had to approach sexuality in a gentler way, showing respect to the emotional and psychological complexities of female intimacy – all that with sophistication which fitted our visual identity, and a playfulness which articulated being ‘into the wylde’ – the freedom of connecting with a natural flow. The brand tagline ‘reawaken play’ and social hashtags ‘#VulvaLovinCare’ and ‘#FreeTheV’ all communicate the brand’s message of connection, natural vulva health, and between-the-sheets fun.
Creating the brand messaging highlighted some very real issues around fem-care messaging – we wanted to be progressive, forward thinking, even bold, but can we really say ‘vulva’ on the pack? and will we sound like a GUM clinic doctor if we do? Our messaging had to be direct, we didn’t want to shy away from talking about female anatomy, but if we were honest about how women communicate, the word ‘downstairs’ is far more likely to be used than ‘vulva’ in everyday conversation. We navigated uncharted paths of how to say natural lubrication without saying ‘moist’ or ‘wet’ (too gross, too X rated), and whether yoni, vulva or just ‘down-under’ are best suited to describing where the product goes (we went with the latter). After 6 years of development, and almost 2 years of brand creation, Into the Wylde’s ‘Wylde One’ water-based lubricant is finally set to launch on Monday 13th April, and we hope will resonate with sexually active women of all ages, reawakening play and lubricated lovin’.