COLOR DIRECTION FOR MSR EXPLORE SNOWSHOES: FRESH, MODERN, GENDER-NEUTRAL
The Situation
The Winter 2023-24 Explore Snowshoe design update focused on incorporating some of the excellent features of the already successful Paragon and Paraglide bindings - a welcome improvement to the existing Explore binding. The color selection for these snowshoes needed to visually straddle the space between the more conservative, timeless palette chosen for the less technical Trail Snowshoe series, and the brightest, most aggressive palette reserved for the Ascent Snowshoe series.
Research and Findings
Research into color trends covered direct and indirect competition and spanned multiple adjacent industries, from fashion and art to other snow sports, combining our observations of those industries with what we saw from our trend forecasting service. From there we evolved trend-relevant colors to ensure a brand-appropriate palette.
Balancing how the Explore colors would sit next to the Trail and Ascent snowshoe lines, as well as a focus on visually signaling that this series had been totally updated, I then decided on a color story that could be applied with a unisex story in mind. In the end we landed on an interesting but neutral and modern offering informed by the our research. Below you can see the evolution of the palette, and how I applied it to the Explore Series snowshoes.
A Unisex Vision
While MSR remained committed to offering Men’s and Women’s snowshoe sizes for the sake of ease of shopping for most customers, I wanted the colors we applied to embody an actively unisex nature. It had become important to move beyond the land of teal and magenta as the main colors offered in the typical women’s size range.
EXPLORE SNOWSHOE SERIES FINAL COLORS
SELECT WORKS
SHELTER
SLEEPING BAGS + QUILTS
PONCHOS