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Health & Fitness

For Mr. Fox, new name renews green focus

Achieving the kind of professional legacy and success attendant to having an entire company named in your honor – by someone else, no less – typically takes decades.

Fox Bedard wasn’t even in preschool.

After nearly four years under the banner of EcoMovement Consulting & Hauling, owner Rian Bedard recently announced the launch of Mr. Fox Composting, an homage to both Bedard’s oldest son and the crafty, Robin Hood-esque Roahld Dahl character of the same name.

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According to Bedard, the motivation behind the name-change was simple: let the name – the logo, the letters, the brand – do the talking.

“There’s a simplicity and a playfulness to the name that I think maybe wasn’t there before,” Bedard explained. “We went from a very accurate but wordy name to one that anyone anywhere can understand. And that’s worth a lot.”

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Bedard’s son, born shortly after EcoMovement’s founding, may have been the re-brand’s chief inspiration, but it was Bridget Sprague who, in Bedard’s words, provided the motivating spark.

Sprague, owner of Be Good Branding and a friend of Bedard’s, conducted an extensive, crowd-sourced analysis of Bedard’s target market – local, sustainability-driven families. What she found was disconnect not uncommon with her clientele: just because your name is specific, doesn’t mean it’s memorable.

“I purposely picked people who had never heard of EcoMovement, and what I found was that I’d often be asked to repeat the name of the company,” Sprague said. “It’s not that they didn’t like the name, per se; but the fact that they were asking was kind of revealing. It just wasn’t speaking to them in the way that it should.”

In the beginning, EcoMovement honed its efforts specifically on the regional restaurant industry, working with owners and managers to institute comprehensive composting programs in an effort to dramatically reduce waste, while rendering the mounds of would-be waste into healthy, plant-ready soil.

To be sure, the company’s commercial customers – the Portsmouth Brewery, Pocos, the Black Trumpet, the list goes on – have always been Bedard’s bread and butter; a client base where a technical name like EcoMovement Consulting & Hauling could flame, rather than stifle, the kind of word-of-mouth crucial for any small business.

But after launching his residential compost program in 2012 – where customers pay just six dollars a week for pick-up – Bedard quickly realized that re-doubling his efforts on that front offered the clearest path for growth, exposure and, most importantly, community education.

Without thinking, the 29-year-old entrepreneur turned to Sprague. Right away, the latter honed in one, particularly common survey refrain: people trusted Bedard, even if they didn’t quite understand how his business worked.

“People really rooted for him,” Sprague noted. “There was a magnetic personality there that people were drawn to.”

Bedard might not put it quite in those terms, but the directive was crystal clear.

“From the beginning it was all about becoming more focused on what we do and what we represent,” he said. “Going through that process with Bridget was a great experience, and an essential one when you get down to it.”

Towards the end of one of their regular strategy sessions, Sprague – her extensive research now complete – arrived at one of her final slides: an image of a fox atop an orange garbage truck with the words “Mr. Fox Composting” emblazoned across the top. It was, in Sprague’s retelling, intended to be more a lark than a perspective-shifting light bulb.

“I said, that’s it,” Bedard recalled. “I knew all along we needed to be more relatable and approachable, and this was that. It made total sense immediately.”

The resulting brand overhaul and logo – designed by Pixels & Pulp – has certainly made its aesthetic mark: Bedard has been selling tee shirts and hats at an impressive clip, in the process helping expose his newly-minted company to an even bigger audience.

But while the appeal of Mr. Fox’s playful, whimsical logo might seem steeped in the temporary, the message, Bedard says, is anything but.

“Composting is all about creating a better future for the next generation, so having a name with so much meaning provides a lot of added motivation,” Bedard said. “And let’s be honest: foxes are pretty cool. Though I might be a bit biased.”

 

Learn more about Mr. Fox Composting at www.zerowastenow.com

Learn more about Be Good Branding at www.begoodbranding.com

For more info on Green Alliance, please visit www.greenalliance.biz
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