CASE STUDY:
SOLLUNA YOGA BRAND DEVELOPMENT
The Strategic Pivot
I was tasked with defining and executing the complete brand identity, look, and feel for the former "Solluna Yoga Retreats." Leveraging deep market analysis, I engineered a strategic brand name pivot. This moved the client away from being 'locked in' as a retreat business—a category where everyone and their dog offers a trip—since their true expertise was in wellness and yoga instruction.
This established Solluna Yoga as the core entity, immediately differentiating the brand by prioritizing the style and quality of instruction over a generic travel destination. This methodical approach ensured the development of a scalable brand architecture that easily accommodates future growth, allowing for clear Brand Extensions like 'Solluna Yoga Classes' and 'Solluna’s Retreats' while maintaining a sharp focus on the core wellness offerings.
The New Brand Mission
The founders' initial 'yoga retreat' vision quickly evolved into a powerful and, frankly, more marketable, wellness mission. Solluna Yoga is more than just a getaway; its focus quickly shifted from traditional yoga to a broader wellness framework.
Solluna now offers a variety of advanced practices, including breath-work, chakra tuning and awakening, meditative wellness techniques, energy work, and emotional release and healing methods. The brand now offers these as an all-in-one package during their remote retreats to offer a truly transformative experience, rather than just a relaxing travel destination.
VISUAL IDENTITY & STORY
The brand’s visual identity needed to communicate this intense, esoteric, and physically demanding program.
LOGO & BRAND NAME
The word 'Solluna' encompasses the Latin words for 'Sun' and 'Moon,' which together symbolize the balance of personal energies (Yin and Yang, for example). The logo was designed to depict this synergy of energies by illustrating a yogi practicing a Tree Pose (a Sun Salutation element) encapsulated by the sun's rays on the left and the crescent of the moon on the right, within a perfect circle symbolizing wholeness.
The Solluna Yoga logo depicts balance between the Sun and Moon, which is similar to Yin & Yang.
The logo was designed to depict this synergy of energies by illustrating a yogi practicing a tree pose which is often used in Yoga as a "Sun Salutation" encapsulated by the rays of the sun on the left, and crescent of the moon on the right, within a perfect circle, which symbolizes the whole. The brand name is integrated into the website URL.
CREATIVE EXECUTION
To promote this specialized experience, a quiet brochure simply wouldn't cut it. The marketing strategy was engineered around an aggressive, immersive video ad campaign that offers a visceral experience.
Digital Execution and Conversion
The digital strategy focused on creating an engaging entry point and a streamlined path to conversion.
Video Ads: The script was designed to evoke a very visceral response. Since the retreat is nestled between deep jungle and the Caribbean Sea, the viewer is taken on a journey through lush jungle, adventurous tours of waterfalls, night hikes, bonfires, and zip-lining, contrasting with calming scenes of sunrise meditation on the beach, massage, and flowing through yoga poses in serene settings. The video ads garnered over 500K views, and brought 4K people to the website.
WEBSITE: SOLLUNA.YOGA
I strategically opted to incorporate the brand name into the URL with the use of a custom domain extension, .yoga. This strategy makes finding the website easy and memorable when the logo is printed on branded materials. The main function of the website is to inform customers of the brand, provide details about the retreats, and collect payments.
USER INTERFACE DESIGN
The UI design on the website was purposed for a friendly, accessible, easy-to-read interface on both mobile and desktop screens. Many of the IU decisions are centered around a funnel page design that is meant to convert. The strategy followed the process of providing engaging content (video as a first-touch), a brief overview, social proof, and a CTA with a means of providing payment.
Screenshots of both mobile and desktop layouts of Solluna.Yoga
DIGITAL MARKETING & PERFORMANCE
Following the creative execution, I designed and managed a high-impact Google Ads video campaign, demonstrating my ability to tie creative vision to measurable performance.
Geographic Strategy: The initial global reach (targeting the Americas for the Costa Rica location) was quickly optimized. Based on early performance data, I retracted the focus to key profit centers, ultimately concentrating efforts on Washington D.C.—which we later discovered was the world's largest market for yoga retreats! It’s always nice when market opportunity aligns with your home address.
Performance Metrics: The video campaign was an instant success. In an ecosystem where a thousand views is often a struggle for new small brands, our initial creative achieved over 1.35M views and drove over 7,000 unique visitors to the site during the life of the ad, showcasing a strong hook and highly effective creative-to-audience match.
This time series shows the overall number of views, click through rate, average cost per view and view rate. Flatlines indicate times when the ad was not running.