Royal Canadian Yacht Club
B2C / Brand guidelines / Brand implementation / Brand strategy & positioning / Competitive audits / Content creation / Corporate communications / Customer research & analysis / Digital marketing / Graphic design / Ideation / Key messaging / Logo & brand design
Home to Olympic medallists, international champions and more than 170 years of history, the Royal Canadian Yacht Club, or RCYC, is the country’s pre-eminent sailing club. It’s also home to a vast sports program that rivals those of any private members’ club in Canada’s largest city—all centred around two clubhouses, a historic gem in the Toronto Islands and a year-round home in the city’s Annex neighbourhood.
While the club’s reputation for sailing was well-known in the yachting world, the other half of its programming—squash, tennis, swimming, lawn bowling, fitness and social activities—wasn’t as readily apparent.
Our assignment was to guide the RCYC through a brand refresh that would honour its sailing legacy while positioning the club for further growth. Our brand research included extensive member surveys, in-depth interviews with key stakeholders and workshops with the senior leadership team. Through this research, we helped uncover what makes the club so special—and how best to articulate that to prospective members.
Our brand strategy team determined that RCYC needed to counter perceptions that it’s an organization exclusively for sailors or the uber-wealthy. At the same time, we did not want to diminish its sailing offering nor downplay the prestige of the club.
We began the brand refresh by articulating a brand position that the RCYC offers members a unique experience: not a sailing club, not a sports club, not a social club, but rather, all three at once.
From that brand positioning, we built out key messages that convey the many ways that members can live out RCYC’s tradition of excellence, but in a tone of voice that is welcoming, unfussy and even a little bit playful.
We then developed a tagline that neatly summarized this new positioning: New horizons. Timeless traditions.
Where our brand communications strategy sought to highlight the vast range of activities and perks of being a member, our graphic design strategy was to leverage the club’s sailing heritage to stand out visually.
To bring this strategy to life, our designers pored through the club’s trove of insignia and memorabilia. No other club in the region can claim the heritage that RCYC has, and bringing these elements to the fore anchored the new brand identity in an aesthetic language that is fresh, yet familiar, to the club’s current membership.
With a striking, coherent visual identity to express the club’s prestigious sailing history—and a brand communications strategy to demystify the world of yacht clubs—RCYC’s new brand stands as a clear representation of a club like no other in Canada.
