2X Adweek’s fastest growing agency
29 Sep 2020

Eaze Relaunches Its Iconic Cannabis Brand

Written by George De’Ath
The TL;DR version of this article
🗞️PRESS

Weed delivery giant’s 2.0 rebranding designed by Born & Bred shows how far cannabis has come.

September 28, 2020 – San Francisco, CA – Eaze, California’s largest legal cannabis delivery marketplace, today unveils its first brand refresh since their initial 2014 launch. As Eaze shifts from a technology-based logistics service to a vertical retail business with its own line of consumer brands, the company sought a new positioning and brand that reflects this evolution. Building a full-scale out-of-home campaign to launch with the redesign, Eaze enlisted the support of Born & Bred, a SF-based studio that specializes in designing scalable brands in tandem with campaigns, and showcasing numerous award-winning cannabis brands in their portfolio.

The original Eaze brand, with its simple blue and white signature logo, set the tone for the modern trope of cannabis branding: discretion. Following Eaze’s lead in being reserved, newcomer brands aimed to decrease stigma for new consumers, avoid any regulatory restrictions, and make themselves appealing to Silicon Valley investors with hopes of reaching broad consumer demographics. But now, with over $200 million in funding and six million completed deliveries to date, Eaze is utilizing their stature as the largest legal cannabis marketplace in California to redefine the industry’s aesthetics once again. Evolving to ‘Eaze 2.0,’ the brand becomes one of few to firmly position themselves in the market with an identity that speaks to their core audience: passionate cannabis consumers.

Eaze is a very different company today than even a couple of years ago, and cannabis has reached a whole new level of normalization. The rebrand reflects Eaze’s 2.0 business strategy and where this very magic plant is taking us in the future.

Eaze’s Vice President of Marketing Sheena Shiravi

In building a flexible identity system that truly takes the brand to the edges of our imaginations, the branding specialists at Born & Bred took advantage of the simplicity and the brand recognition that the existing logo carries. With subtle updates to provide an understated sophistication to the custom hand-drawn type, the logo becomes the anchor that allows the rest of the brand to run wild.

“Understanding Eaze’s consumer base as passionate cannabis consumers really enabled us to celebrate weed culture with this new identity, while still holding onto Eaze’s roots in technology,” said George De’Ath, Co-Founder and Chief Creative Officer of Born & Bred. “The identity we designed is groundbreaking in that we achieve brand recognition through a system that is both visually fantastic and easily iterated upon.”

“Highly Calculated Delivery” is befittingly used as a motif throughout the brand and campaign, twisting cannabis-culture history and humor into a traditionally tech-based offering. Campaigning in every market across California, Eaze communicates real, relevant data, with a humorous spin on each ad. Since these headline “facts” range from bubble baths to moon landings, Born & Bred designed a flexible grid system that can incorporate multiple art styles and scenarios for rapid iteration and scalability. In multiple instances, billboards have customized copy to incorporate hyper-relevant geographically targeted facts and stories. The pixel-grid motif extends into collector’s quality packaging and merchandise, web and social, building the brand identity off of this distinct aesthetic more so than the logo itself.

Pre-legalization, it was difficult to strategically understand a cannabis consumer base and build brands accordingly. This brand relaunch is the first of a larger shift in the industry, taking the groundbreaking step to showcase cannabis users quite literally at their highest. As the market leader, Eaze understands that their objective is no longer to just de-stigmatize cannabis for first-time consumers, but rather, to celebrate cannabis for those who have already become regular consumers. In utilizing their brand as both a solid foundation and a versatile platform for explosive growth, the new Eaze brand quite literally deep dives into a fantastical future.

ABOUT BORN&BRED

Born & Bred is a full-service agency that specializes in building and scaling brands of all sizes. With the ability to provide strategy to identity to engagement, the agency supports partners with creative thinking at every stage. Headquartered in San Francisco, California, the agency operates across the country with employees everywhere from Los Angeles and New York. Born & Bred was co-founded by George De’Ath and Kyle Merwin in 2018. For more information, contact Born & Bred at hello@164.90.147.195 or visit 164.90.147.195.