Case Study

Powell River Climbing Co-op

Powell River Climbing Co-op is a scrappy, small town co-operative climbing gym, built with love on the labour of a few dedicated volunteers (yep I’m one of them!) and big local grants. Although it’s co-operatively owned, it still needed to cover its costs and then some in a town that is predominantly made up of families and older adults.

What it needed was branding that was going to show that this is a modern gym worthy of a membership, but that it was more inclusive and welcoming than big city gyms aimed only at young adults.

Here's what I did for the 'Coop':

Created a messaging strategy for the co-op to ensure everyone - young, old, families, and everyone in between - would feel welcome and empowered to give climbing a try.
Created the color scheme, typography standards, and iconic logo to be splashed around on signs, T-shirts, and swag (aka. get your fans to do your advertising for you!)
Built the co-op a fully responsive, branded website including a time-saving widget that let's people fill out their waivers at home.
Wrote the website for them, with a big focus on explaining how things work at the gym. This cuts way down on repetitive customer questions and saves time, money, and sanity.
Followed current SEO practices and got them ranked #1 in local Google searches for 'climbing', 'rock climbing', and 'climbing gym'.
Created additional collateral for promotional, revenue-boosting needs: social media templates, event posters, and gift certificates.

What can I say? Our little ‘climbing gym that could’ is thriving, even through COVID. Memberships are up and a passionate community of climbers has come together to make it their own. The consensus among them is that it really does have a friendly, welcoming vibe that is quickly being lost from the big climbing gyms. Success!

“Tracy helped us create the culture that sets us apart from big city gyms.”

Tracy was involved from Day 1 in our co-operative climbing gym start up and we couldn’t have made this happen without her. We wanted to make sure our gym not only looked legitimate, but had a friendly, family focused atmosphere that felt more inclusive than most big city bouldering gyms. Tracy used her whip smart business sense to bring this to life in our logo, branding, website design and messaging, and it worked. The gym is doing incredibly well and our members are always saying how welcoming it feels. Thank you Tracy for everything you do!

Kevan R.

Director, PR Climbing Co-op

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