Velcro was, at its core, a material – not a brand. I led the shift from B2B to B2C: six new product categories in fifteen months, new markets across Asia and Latin America, and a campaign that protected the word “velcro” itself before it became generic for good.
In the end, we where nominated for:
Household and Consumer Goods Team of the Year 2018
(nominees; Colgate-Palmolive, Spectrum Brands, The Clorox Company, Velcro Companies)
Trademark Team of the Year 2018
(nominees; Amazon.com, Microsoft, Netflix, Nintendo, VelcroCompanies)
This is how we got there
Everyone said “velcro” to mean hook-and-loop fastener, and that was exactly the problem. The more the word entered everyday language, the closer the trademark drifted toward the fate of “aspirin” and “escalator” — ruled generic, and lost.
Meanwhile the company that actually owned the name had built its business almost entirely on the B2B side: industrial contracts, footwear and apparel manufacturers, no real presence on a shelf a consumer would ever stand in front of. I joined the leadership team tasked with building a global consumer division from nothing, reporting to the Group CMO and the President of the Consumer Division.
The situation
A hundred-year-old industrial company doesn’t become a consumer brand by deciding to. It has to build the muscle for it — innovation, brand strategy, marketing, sales, digital, e-commerce — often from a standing start, and it has to do this while its most valuable asset, its own name, is quietly at risk of disappearing into the dictionary.
What we did
We started with the unglamorous scaffolding: as a leadership team, we defined the group’s consumer brand and sales strategy, a five-year P&L profile, and the KPIs and margin requirements everything else would be measured against. Then we built the organisation to match it — recruiting across product innovation, brand strategy, marketing execution, sales, digital and e-commerce, at both global and local level, with focus on the US, UK/EMEA, Mexico, China, Hong Kong and Australia. For a stretch, I managed the US and UK teams directly in the absence of local senior leadership — roughly half my time was spent on a plane.
On the product side, we mapped a three-year innovation pipeline and moved: six entirely new categories launched within fifteen months. On the brand side, we ran a major brand equity project in parallel, specifically to build distinctiveness and reduce the risk of “velcro” finishing the job of becoming a generic term before the business built around it had a chance to become a real consumer brand.
What happened
Within the first eighteen months we’d launched into eight new markets across Asia-Pacific and five across Latin America, with double-digit growth in the first fifteen months. And the brand — the actual legal, ownable asset the whole business depends on — was protected rather than eroded by its own success.
The part that doesn’t show up in a launch report: proving, inside a hundred-year-old industrial company, that “brand” wasn’t a marketing department’s pet project, but the thing standing between the business and losing the right to its own name.
Watch the commercial
