Behind the Work → Gozney

Activities: Desk research, digital audit, team member interviews, supplier interviews, customer interviews

Roccbox changed the game. It took 4 years to build and 24 hours to raise £1m in crowdfunding. Within 3 years, it was sold worldwide in 50+ countries.

The Roccbox was also the first foray into the B2C world for Gozney, a brand built on B2B expertise and embedded in the restaurant trade. A business that started life as The Stone Baked Pizza Company had pivoted regularly, driven by engineering ideation and opportunity.

However, to many, Gozney as a brand was secondary to their hallmark product, to the extent that customers thought that Gozney had acquired and diluted the Roccbox brand, or were competing with it.

And, for all of Gozney’s B2B chops, there was little to connect varying arms of the business or reinforce the master brand. Known for formidable build quality and unrivalled innovation in the trade space, they were struggling to highlight their points of difference to a wider audience amid a multitude of noisy competitors.

Our brief was to evolve the look & feel and revolutionise the brand positioning, in order to alter perception and prepare the brand to scale at pace internationally.

The internal team were armed with a route-to-market strategy, quantitative data from each market and the learnings from previously tried-and-failed brand projects.

This foundation formed the basis of a rapid brand transformation, merging brand strategy, creative and implementation, and informing commercial plans for the short & long term.

We started by identifying a brand architecture that could house current and future product iterations across both trade and consumer arms of the business, supporting the master brand and connecting the brand name to a type of oven, rather than any single product.

Gozney’s dedication to production and design manifested in a simply better looking, harder working product, and this was best presented as an aspirational, ‘life-changing’ purchase – the key to a more enriching experience, a craft to master and a brand to associate with.

It was clear that key competitors majored on a combination of sociability and engineering, drawing connections with the great outdoors and home hospitality wherever possible. But this required a ‘ruggedness’, an often pastiche expression of masculinity that was dating fast.

We learned that the majority of high-end retailers, where Gozney products were sold, housed wide ranges from individual brands, creating an opportunity to take over spaces and share a series of layered messages in POS & packaging.

And we knew that Gozney needed to win on word of mouth amongst an audience that often takes months, if not years, to decide what to buy; where research & review, and loyalty & advocacy are high. A succinct, instantly recognisable message that pronounced the brand position had to be the centrepiece of the brand to optimise retail relationships and the commercial strategy.

We developed a messaging structure beyond the strapline, crafting comms to connect each aspect of the brand ecosystem and for each territory, from advertising to the website, to social, to print, instore and to accompany the products.

Unboxing would be key. To win on experience – the premium brand mantra – Gozney needed to consider the entire customer journey, across all touchpoints, and the moment one of their ovens are delivered to your door carries as much leverage as any other part of the experience. This primed a packaging format that placed storytelling at key steps in the journey.

Gozney ovens are designed for life, forged by a lifetime’s obsession from brand’s founder, Tom, and a fanatical determination by the Gozney team to overdeliver.