Jack Bleakley
Introducing La Balme
We've just helped launch La Balme, a natural CBD muscle remedy made by athletes, for athletes. It's a story about finding space nobody else owned in a crowded category, and launching it in the real world as much as on screen.
The Challenge
La Balme came to us with a product athletes loved: clean ingredients, designed by people who push their bodies to the limit.
The category didn't make room for it. Walk into any pharmacy and you'll see the same thing on every shelf: sterile white packaging, clinical language and the same three promises of relief, repair and recovery.
La Balme had the product to win. What it didn't have yet was a world to belong to.
The Unlock
Once we'd mapped that red ocean, the Unfair Truth was hiding in the name. La Balme is a mountain in the French Alps, where the founder grew up skiing and learned what recovery really means after a day on steep terrain.
So we stopped talking about muscle recovery and started talking about alpine recovery. That was the Blue Ocean Move. La Balme stopped being one more remedy on the pharmacy shelf and became the only brand in a space of its own.
Building the Brand World
The identity grew out of that alpine story. Its retro ski look, drawn from vintage ski posters and mountain culture, stands apart from the clinical codes of the category. The Signal is Fresh Tracks, taken from the marks skiers leave in untouched snow.
Launching on the Mountain
We didn't want La Balme's launch to be an Instagram post. So we took the brand back to La Balme, the mountain it's named after, and organised a freeride and freestyle ski competition under its name, with world-class athletes racing on the same slopes the founder grew up on.
La Balme ran the event rather than sponsoring it. That race gave the brand proof no ad could buy: it belonged to the world it was selling to. The behind-the-scenes content from that weekend has been as valuable as any polished campaign.
The Result
La Balme now owns its own space, alpine recovery, where it has no direct competition. It got there by finding a story nobody else on the pharmacy shelf could tell.
That story was already there, in the founder's past and the brand's name. Most brands already have one.