Founded in 2004, Sky Zone Indoor Trampoline Parks created an entirely new category of location-based entertainment. Over a decade later, Sky Zone had opened over 150 franchise locations and expanded into new countries. But as the business matured, so too did the competition; imitators began springing up left and right, feeding off of Sky Zone’s rapid success. It became increasingly clear that a change was in order if Sky Zone was going to keep its position as category leader.

We were tasked with determining the viability of—and ultimately executing on—a brand positioning that could appeal to new customers without alienating the existing core audience, thus growing the customer base and driving long-term growth.

We developed brand pillars that could define the experience as it currently exists while providing a foundation for the brand moving forward. We then crafted a positioning statement that could unite all the brand pillars, appeal to our expanded audience, differentiate from competition, and serve as a north star to guide the company and our creative executions.

Our visual approach centered on three key principles: motion, moments, and owning orange—an existing, yet underutilized brand color. The brand voice is meant to extend the visual approach by being active, engaging, inclusive, impactful, and aspirational.

Franchise businesses present a unique challenge when it comes to web design. Not only did we have to bring forth a design language that would communicate the new positioning, we also had to develop capabilities that would allow 150+ individual parks—all with different hours, prices, attractions, and park-specific imagery—to keep their pages accurate and up to date while avoiding inconsistencies, slow load times, or complications to the user experience. Graphical complexity and expectations for high traffic lead us to a development approach of serving content out of cache, allowing us to keep load times and infrastructure needs minimal.

Perhaps the largest technological challenge was designing and developing a custom CMS in a way that mirrors the organizational structure of the franchise business—allowing individual franchise owners to control and edit crucial information regarding their parks in a way that keeps the content fully integrated into the design and experience of the site. This information then had to be packaged and put forth on other relevant sections of the site, such as the park locator so that users know exactly what’s available to them at their local park.