Bounce Back Beny & Friends

A child can miss a shot and wonder whether they should stop playing. A friend can want some space and make another child wonder whether they still belong. A small mistake can fill an entire afternoon.

There is no shortage of children's content that tells kids how to feel. There is much less that shows them characters working it out, badly at first, together. The gap was not a show or a product. It was a world coherent enough that a show, a website, stories, cards and activities could all grow out of the same place.

A lesson lands when it grows out of what happens between the friends, not when it is announced at the end. That meant the characters had to be genuinely unfinished. They needed their own struggles, their own interests, and their own ways of moving through the world.

It also meant the brand had to be built belief first. Get the belief right and the characters, the voice, the stories and the products all have somewhere to come from.

Write the foundation before drawing anything. Establish the central belief, the purpose, the promise and the positioning, then build the cast against it so each friend adds something the others do not.

The central belief: you can feel what you feel, stay kind to yourself, and find a next step with help from your friends. Bouncing back can mean trying again, asking for support, repairing a friendship, or taking time before you are ready to move. A child does not have to hide a feeling to belong here.

I created the brand. Through Seven Tides I wrote the brand foundation, built the character world and its naming, defined the voice and the visual direction, art directed every character, and built the identity system, the trading cards, the website plan and the launch plan.

A neighborhood of fourteen animal friends with different interests and different ways of being: Beny brings basketball energy, and the crew brings music, surfing, gardening, making, art, dance, skating and quiet exploring. The court has a beat, the mural has different colors, the garden has room to grow, and the shore has waves to ride.

Around them sits a full brand foundation now in its third version: belief, purpose, mission, vision, promise and positioning, a character style bible, an identity system and brand board, a trading card series, an animation production kit, and a website and launch plan.

The tagline the whole thing hangs on: lifelong tools for everyday adventures.

The world is built and the brand is launch ready. A show and products are future possibilities rather than things available today, so there are no performance numbers here yet.

What it demonstrates is different from the rest of this site. The other case studies show what I do with an existing brand. This one shows what happens when there isn't one.