We just helped launch La Balme, a natural CBD muscle remedy redefining recovery for athletes. This is a story about finding uncontested space in a crowded category by building a brand in the real world, not just on screens.

The Challenge

La Balme came to us with a product that worked better than Deep Heat. Cleaner ingredients. Faster relief. Built by athletes for athletes.

But the recovery category didn't care. Walk into any pharmacy and you'll see the same thing: sterile white packaging, clinical language, generic promises. Relief. Repair. Recovery.

La Balme had the quality to win. They just didn't have a world to belong to yet.

The Unlock

The answer was in the name. La Balme: a mountain in the French Alps where the founders grew up skiing. Where they learned what real recovery feels like after pushing limits in steep terrain.

So we stopped talking about muscle recovery and started talking about alpine recovery. Not a lab remedy. A mountain remedy.

That shift changed everything. We moved La Balme from competing in the commodity recovery space to creating an entirely new category.

This is Blue Ocean Branding: finding uncontested space by creating meaning no one else can own.

Building the Brand World

The identity became a system built around that alpine story. A retro ski aesthetic that stands apart from clinical category codes. A symbol called Fresh Tracks, drawn from the marks skiers carve in untouched snow. Visual language pulled from vintage ski posters and mountain culture.

But here's where it gets interesting.

Launching on the Mountain

We didn't just launch La Balme with a an Instagram post. We took it back to ‘La Balme’ the mountain the brand was named after. Organising a freeride and freestyle skiing competition under the La Balme name, with world-class athletes competing on those same slopes.

The product wasn't a sponsor. It was part of the culture.

That event did more for the brand than any ad campaign could. It created proof. It showed the market that La Balme belonged to a world Deep Heat could never access. Not because of marketing, but because of authenticity.

Real-world activations like this aren't nice-to-haves anymore. They're essential. No algorithm can replicate the feeling of being there. The behind-the-scenes content from that competition became as valuable as any polished campaign.

Pro tip: Great brands are built in the real world, not design files.

The Result

Today, La Balme isn't competing with Deep Heat. They've created their own space: alpine recovery, where they're the only player.

That's Blue Ocean Branding. Not being better in an existing category. Creating a new one entirely.

Brands that break through aren't built by following category rules. They're built by finding space no one else is looking at and making it yours.

Get off the screen. Go to where your brand actually exists. Find the story that's already there, waiting to be unlocked.

That's where Blue Ocean Branding comes from. Not conference rooms. Not Figma files. The real world.

See the full project: La Balme Case Study

Ready to find your uncontested space? Get in touch