The Challenge

Montreal-based outerwear brand Orage needed a Tone of Voice reference to govern how the brand sounds everywhere it shows up including product copy, social media, newsletters and email, customer service and web content. Without one, the brand risked sounding like a different company depending on which touch point was speaking to consumer and retail partners.

The Opportunity

A tone of voice guide is easy to write as a list of adjectives and hard to make useful. The more useful version shows people why something works, in the brand's own voice, so they can repeat it. That became the real opportunity: build the guide from Orage's own best real-world moments rather than inventing rules in a vacuum. And, along the way, help sharpen some of the brand-foundation language sitting underneath it.

My Role

• Engaged directly by Orage to lead the Tone of Voice project

• Cleaned up and reorganized existing Orage brand-foundation language (who they are, their purpose, culture, mission, archetypes) and added new pages—including a persona-based creative device—to help the team articulate its brand platform more clearly

• Authored and designed the full Tone of Voice deck as a standalone deliverable

The Approach

Rather than prescribe tone from the outside, I audited Orage's own content across every channel. This included real customer service exchanges, social posts, newsletters, advertising and web stories. From there, I pulled out the examples that already sounded most like the brand at its best. Each one became a working example of what it does well and why, so the guidance was grounded in things Orage had actually said rather than abstract rules.

Execution

• Cleaned up existing mission, purpose, and culture copy, and added new pages—including reframing Orage's brand persona through a recognizable ski-culture figure—to help the team articulate the brand platform more clearly

• Audited real Orage assets across five touch points—product copy, customer service, newsletters/email, social media, and web content/journal—and annotated what worked and why

• Wrote original examples, including full product descriptions, to demonstrate the voice in practice

• Designed and delivered the Tone of Voice deck as Orage's standing reference

Results & Impact

• Delivered a practical, example-based Tone of Voice reference Orage didn't have before, grounded in the brand's own strongest existing content

• Gave Orage's team and outside contributors a consistent way to check new copy against real, annotated examples rather than abstract rules

• Helped sharpen how Orage articulates its own brand platform, on top of the voice guidance itself