+Drop

A merch division, spun out.

Advoc8 is an experiential marketing agency. Their merchandising division, MerchRaise, needed to stand on its own as an external-facing brand with a 5-to-10 year horizon. Workhorse came in on a brief authored with Joe Greeley, Carolyn Hallowell, and Ben Adams in April 2020. The arc covered naming, brand strategy, identity, and a published brand book.

The naming move set the tone for everything after it. MerchRaise was a SaaS-flavored holdover. +Drop carried the unboxing moment in the name itself. The "+" became the brand's focal mark, dropping into headlines and compositions as both punctuation and graphic device.

Two registers, ten words.

The voice runs on two registers. The operational register is what merch buyers need to hear: Easy, Visible, Streamlined, Efficient, Trackable. The aspirational register is what merch is for: Unexpected, Bold, Creative, Game Changing, Leveled Up. Every piece of +Drop copy lives somewhere on the line between those two columns.

Three audience takeaways anchor the message and travel into every external brief: merch is not just a product with a logo, it's part of the full brand experience; merch can be a one-two punch of revenue and brand awareness; merch can help you build and create fans of your brand.

The brand book was the deliverable.

The July 2021 brand book is the artifact that turns the project into a system. Concept page up front (the +Drop pitch in the brand's own voice). Audience map next (donors, influencer audiences, employees, stakeholders, potential leads). Then the logo section, the typography stack with usage rules, and the six-color palette in RGB and CMYK conversions. The book is the document the in-house team will open mid-task in the years after Workhorse closes the file.

On the page: the system above carries the in-house team. On the page after that: every external partner brief +Drop sends out gets the same opener.