Little did the folks at Sisu know when they embarked on a plan to rebrand, repackage and remarket their line of vitamins that they’d make a conservative brand kind of cool.

Consider the TV campaign launched in February: stark white background, minimalist font, a yoga-ready stick figure that morphs into a pretty impressive bow pose. And the new packaging: sleek gray bottle, vivid cobalt blue lettering. Clearly, this ain’t grandma’s vitamins.

In the world of vitamins where consumers tend to be older (55 and up) and retailers reticent, change can equal big risk. But for Sisu’s director of sales and marketing, Gord Gilles, risk so far has been sweet.

Until April, the 24-year-old high-end brand was a mess of inconsistent packaging, colours and motifs on more than 150 products. Yes, the brand created by Finnish pharmacist Harlan Lahti in 1980 was well respected, known for quality, and increasingly profitable (the fifth largest in Canada last year with sales of $17 million), but its image, well, that’s another story.

‘During the focus group work with both retailers and consumers, we actually took a shot of our product at shelf level,’ recalls Gilles, 44, from Sisu’s head office in Burnaby, B.C. ‘Every time we showed the photo – and we did this with nine different groups – the whole group sat back and went ‘eeww.’ It gave us a really good hint that it was time for a change.’

Gilles, hired by president and CEO Brian Edgar to revive the brand, enlisted the help of Grey Worldwide Northwest in Vancouver. The creatives were thrilled by the rare opportunity to revamp the brand – ‘abandoning everything but the name,’ says account manager Marty Yaskovich.

But to get there Sisu first took a leap of faith. Says Grey ECD Marc Stoiber: ‘[They said] that we have to do something that’s radically different – we might be pushed back from some of the dealers, but we have to push though and make this look fresh and really establish a new way of advertising vitamins and supplements.’ Stoiber credits Gilles with seeing and running with the vision.

Along with Grey’s VP client services Steve Kennedy, Gilles mapped out Sisu’s strategy. That meant focusing on the equity in the brand, the Scandinavian caché behind the name (Sisu is Finnish for fortitude) and targeting the ever-influential 25-to-55 female demographic, while recognizing that regular vitamin consumers – about 42% of the Canadian population – are a fairly savvy bunch.

But consumer marketing was only half the challenge. Retailers don’t like the upheaval ‘new’ brings to the running of their stores. So the Sisu sales team had to be motivated and re-educated. This was a task Gilles handled admirably, says Edgar, by instituting a ‘sell the science’ strategy to educate retailers instead of simply pushing products.

A sales and marketing background spanning 20 years has helped Gilles understand the retailer’s needs, which is why Edgar believes Gilles was the perfect person to head up Sisu’s 20-person sales and five-person marketing group.

Gilles began in 1983 at Kraft Canada in Vancouver as a sales rep. He later moved to Kraft’s marketing department in Montreal where he worked in trade marketing on key accounts. He returned to Vancouver to run Nestlé’s Koala Beverages sales and marketing team for seven years, ending up at Johnson & Johnson’s Lifescan where he was director of sales for five years, then head of marketing for three-and-a-half years.

Gilles is particularly proud of his work at Lifescan because he helped establish the brand in Canada and ‘take the company from one that hadn’t made any marketing strides to one that was almost leading edge.’ That meant elevating the brand by moving into mainstream media, focusing on TV and magazines like Canadian Living instead of the typical diabetes-focused publications, to reach a larger audience.

That experience gave him the groundwork for Sisu’s success.

The clean, stripped-down look of the brand, designed by Jin Nam, a Grey art director, has graced the new labeling and the two 15-second spots (yoga and jump-rope themed), which ran nationally for eight weeks earlier this year. To ensure current users were kept informed, a print campaign illustrating Sisu’s old and new logos ran in health magazines.

And to win over retailers, the Sisu team simply bombarded them with information. ‘Every time a bill went out the door, a piece of communication went with it explaining ‘here’s the new label, here’s how you talk to consumers about it,” says Gilles. In total Sisu sent about 5,000 statement inserts and 4,500 shipping inserts. In addition, shelf talkers were placed in the stores and recommenders – in-store staff at specialty health food stores who advise customers – were sent information supplemented by the re-trained sales reps.

Today, about 50% of Sisu’s newly packaged products are in stores with the full turnover expected by year’s end. Gilles says they will continue to run the print campaign and will revisit the TV campaign next year.

Meanwhile, though, risk is feeling mighty comfy. Brand awareness has jumped 33%.

The projected 5% to 7% sales increase is, at mid-point, at about 4.8%. ‘Right now the category is flat,’ says Gilles. ‘But we’re growing share and we attribute that to packaging and the marketing initiatives we’ve taken.’ Yes, change, it seems, is good.