The Royal Parks Boating and Swimming

Creating a sub-brand to chart new waters

Brand identity
Brand assets
Brand guidelines
Brand activation
Signage and wayfinding
Art direction
Tone of voice

Client

The Royal Parks is the charity responsible for the most famous urban parks in the world. During spring and summer, The Royal Parks open their lakes in Regent’s Park and Greenwich Park, and the boating lake on The Serpentine (in Hyde Park), is open year round for visitors to hire a rowing boat or pedalo, and enjoy a unique perspective on the parks.

Brief

Historically, the boating and public swimming concessions, were managed by different third-parties. Towards the end of 2021, The Royal Parks had an opportunity to bring these services in-house as the contracts were coming to an end at a similar time. So The Royal Parks invested in new rowing boats, children’s boats and pedalos, and were keen to review how their boating and swimming offer could be branded under the new masterbrand guidelines. Having created the masterbrand, Rose were asked to develop the branding for The Royal Parks boating offer. The Royal Parks briefed Rose to help differentiate boating from other Royal Parks experiences, with a unique set of assets including colour palette and photography. In addition The Royal Parks asked Rose to consider how the pattern element of the new Royal Parks masterbrand identity could be adopted appropriately for the boating offer within the parks.

Solution

To ensure the new sub-brand identity would retain a strong relationship to The Royal Parks masterbrand, Rose recommended the boating brand employed the same typeface and brand architecture principles for the logo. Following the same creative formula used for the park patterns, Rose defined a distinctive colour for boating and swimming, creating a unique pattern using the leaf of the willow found at each lake, along with an indigenous swan as the icon. Rose used the bespoke brand elements to create benchmark applications and guidelines for the roll out of the brand across pedalos, rowing boats, children’s boats, signage, tickets, staff uniforms, digital and print communications.

Result

The new boating and swimming brand was launched in July 2022, with both boating and swimming proving incredibly popular with visitors. In the 6 months post launch, The Royal Parks lakes welcomed over 160,000 visitors and achieved record figures of over 2,600 boating customers and 700 swimmers in a single day in Hyde Park¹. In the first full year of insourced, branded boating and swimming, The Royal Parks saw these figures increase 37% to 221,000 boating and swimming visitors², generating income of almost £2.5m, which represented an increase of 85% on the previous year.¹

¹ The Royal Parks Annual Report
² alva.org.uk