In an increasingly crowded market for wellness brands, longtime industry staple Saje has refreshed its brand to stay ahead of an industry that can be filled with fleeting fads and unrealistic messaging.

Saje Natural Wellness and indie agency One Twenty Three West (123w) collaborated on a visual refresh for the more than 30-year-old brand that’s designed to better position Saje in the Canadian and U.S. markets. Its “Remedy Real Life” platform looks to help the brand stand out, grounded in the insight that raised awareness about wellness products since the COVID-19 pandemic, along with a flood of new brands, has resulted in more fads and clichés in the industry’s advertising, leading many to feel “wellness fatigue.”

In contrast to that fatigue, Saje and 123w designed a platform that presents the brand as more natural and proven. The new “Remedy Real Life” creative highlights Saje’s experience in the wellness industry, as well as the brand’s range of natural solutions that can be used to tackle everyday issues.

“We’re really in this juncture, where the platform is about this idea that in a world of synthetics, we’re remedying that by giving you basically these other options that you can swap out synthetics for, whether you have pain or can’t sleep,” Saje executive creative director Jess Willis tells strategy.

The campaign is video-led, with static supporting assets that educate consumers about some of the effective ingredients in the brand’s products. The campaign includes four different everyday scenarios including a stressed parent, a zoned out office worker and a tired sleeper.

It’s a new look for the brand which previously used more passive language and marketing that didn’t show up with a clear point of difference from competitors, Willis says. Now, it’s striking a difference by highlighting the power of its plant-based products, which Willis says is also designed to bring in modern consumers who might be curious to try wellness products.

“Natural wellness has this stigma in the world. It can’t be cool, it can’t be modern, it can’t show up like a really fashionable editorial lifestyle brand,” Willis says. “So I think that was really what we were trying to do is to create a campaign that not only elevated the brand with work that cut through the clutter, but also had a very unique and distinctive point of view that didn’t make plants passive.”

Willis adds that Saje, being a brand that’s famous for products like Liquid Sunshine and Peppermint Halo, doesn’t take itself too seriously and is irreverent, but that point has been devoid in its marketing previously, which the brand wanted to remedy.

123w group strategy director Colin Carroll adds that the agency found, in its work with Saje, that effectiveness is the most important aspect of wellness products to consumers, more than price or quality. The new campaign aimed to highlight that point.

“Natural claims don’t cut it anymore,” Carroll says. “We wanted to make sure that we were always pairing the natural claim with the true effect that it’s going to [have], whether it’s anti-inflammatory, whether it’s going to help you sleep.”

Carroll adds that a goal of the campaign was to open up the brand to people who may not already be thinking about natural wellness as a part of their everyday life.

 “Saje was already winning over the wellness enthusiast,” Carroll says. “[But] our target was the wellness-curious. The way that we talked about them was everyday people: they’re stressed out students, they’re sleep-deprived dads, they’re burned out gig workers, they’re anxious kids … We felt like the wellness-curious was basically a way to capture people who are open to trying something new to give themselves some relief.”

The new platform is accompanied by a new visual look for the brand, that was designed with 123w to signal an evolution for Saje without disrupting the existing brand logo. The rebranding updated every element of Saje’s visual identity with a design that flexes across retail touchpoints.

The challenge that 123w faced was how to transform the brand and its look without changing the logo, product or its stores, says 123w partner and creative director of design Mooren Bofill says. The agency worked with Saje to utilize browns, rich greens and jewel tones that would represent the brand’s boldness, with visual elements that play off of standard Rx graphics, borrow labels from prescription bottles and better celebrate Saje’s products with tight close-ups of the product.

“We combined that fashion, editorial aesthetic that’s modernized, but it’s also thoughtfully done where there’s a reason to every single choice,” Bofill says. “It’s subtle cues, but understanding that is what it takes to transform a brand. It’s not just about making something cool and trendy again, but rather what’s inherent in our DNA that we can modernize.”