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Building a brand around an unforgettable experience
Client
Treacle Velo
Sector
Sports and Travel
Treacle provides a unique training experience for athletes and enthusiasts along famous cycling routes, glacial mountain lakes and alpine roads.
Creative Strategy
Visual Identity
Web Design
Wordpress
Social Strategy
Iain Hastings runs Treacle Velo from the Alps. Most of the team are triathletes or endurance athletes themselves. They live the thing they sell, which means they understand the people they're selling to. That understanding is the asset the whole business is built on.
The category they were operating in is one Ian had been through himself. Big organised training tours. Pro-team-branded weeks. Club bookings where the club manager picks a package and everyone arrives expecting a hotel buffet and a bike rack. The riding is usually fine. The rest is hit-or-miss. You eat in a function room, train hard, retreat to your room, repeat. By Friday you've got Strava data and very little else.
Treacle was already running and already excellent. Premium chalet, sixteen rooms, a chef trained by a Michelin team, full mechanic setup, route planning, physio access, gym access, pool access, swim lake on the doorstep, running trails out the front, and some of the most famous Cols in cycling within riding distance. The product was world-class. The brand wasn't yet doing the work the product deserved.
The existing identity was generic and overly fussy. Safe. Unownable. The kind of identity that sits in the middle of every other training-camp website without being recognisable as anyone in particular. Ian wanted the brand to match what was actually happening at the chalet. The work was to make sure that the first impression a triathlete had of Treacle, scrolling on their phone after a Tuesday club session, was an honest preview of the experience they'd have on arrival.
The training-camp category has agreed on what it looks like. Sunset peloton silhouettes. Drone shots of switchbacks. Carbon close-ups. Team kit in pristine condition. Black, red, sometimes a flash of fluoro. Every site within fifteen seconds of each other.
The visual sameness reflects a deeper sameness in the offer. The camps sell the riding. The accommodation is wherever the operator could get a deal. The food is whatever the hotel kitchen does for groups. The athlete arrives, trains, and leaves with the same Strava data they could have bought from any other operator at the same price.
What's missing from the category, even at the top end, is the part that actually compounds. Being looked after by people who understand what you're training for. Eating food that's actually fuelling the work. Coming back to a chalet rather than a hotel. Sharing a table with the people you rode with that day. Building relationships with athletes who'll book the same week next year, and the year after.
The triathlete Treacle is built for isn't compromising on bike spec, swim equipment, or coaching. They don't want to compromise on the camp either. They're paying for an experience that matches the rest of the standards they've already set for themselves.
The gap Treacle was already filling needed a brand sharp enough to make it visible before the booking.
Selected photography by George Powell
The Plan
The bet was to position Treacle in sport's visual language so it would read as legitimate to the right audience, then deliver a brand experience that no competitor in that visual category could match.
Most training-camp brands lead with the bike because the bike is all they've got. Treacle leads with the bike too, because the audience expects that, but the system underneath lets the brand pivot fluently into food, chalet life, recovery, swim, run, and everything else that makes the actual week. Sport-first as the entry point. Hospitality as the depth.
Sitting next to other training-camp brands, Treacle looks like one of them. Open it up and it isn't. That contrast is the strategic move.
Triathlon-first, not cycling-first. Most camps in the Alps default to the bike. Treacle is built around all three disciplines, in one location, in one day if you want it. The identity carries that range without ever apologising for it. Cycling visuals don't dominate. Swim and run sit alongside as equals. That's already a rejection of the category default before any individual design decision is made.
The intensity-mapped colour system. The palette runs from red through to teal, mapped to training intensity. Red sits at the top end. Full effort, maximum heart rate, the hardest sessions. Teal sits at the bottom. Recovery, yoga, sauna, the quiet end of the day. The colours aren't decorative. They're a system that lets the brand speak fluently across the full range of the Treacle experience. A session plan in red feels right for what it is. A page about the chalet's evening routine in teal feels right for what it is. Teal anchors as the primary brand colour, because the brand sits closer to the calm end than the loud one. That choice already says something. Treacle isn't a brand shouting about how hard the riding will be. It's a brand promising the conditions you need to ride that hard and recover well.
The frame system. All sport content sits inside an oblique frame, tilted forward, inferring motion and momentum. All chalet, food, and rest content sits inside a standard frame, still and grounded. The two frame types are a small piece of system thinking doing a lot of strategic work. They tell the audience, visually, that Treacle treats movement and stillness as equally important parts of the experience. Most cycling brands lean their whole identity forward. Treacle leans forward when it should and stops leaning when it shouldn't.
Photography that shows what's actually there. The category default is bikes and bodies and sunsets. Treacle's image world includes those, but also the chef, the food, the table, the lake, the chalet at dusk, the morning quiet before a ride. Competitors can't show this because they don't have it. The photography is the brand's most unfakeable asset.
A wordmark and identity built to be ownable. The existing brand was safe and forgettable. The new one is built to be recognisable on a phone screen, in a kit logo, on a chalet sign, and across a website. Established enough to read as serious. Distinctive enough to read as Treacle.
The System
Treacle had to talk to club managers booking entire chalets, to triathletes booking solo, to pairs training for a specific event, and to teams treating the week as both serious training and social glue. The brand system holds the range without diluting the centre.
The colour-as-intensity logic flexes across every touchpoint. The frame system organises content type at a glance. Photography rotates between sport, food and place. The voice stays steady throughout: serious about the training, generous about the experience, never hyped, never bland.
The system was designed so Treacle could keep producing content across the week, the year, and the next few years without the brand losing its shape.
Visual identity. Brand guidelines and design system. Pre and post-arrival print assets. Email templates. Website build. Social media strategy and ongoing content management.
The website is deliberately not a brochure. It's a shop window. A trust piece, designed to communicate the chalet experience and convert genuine interest into an inquiry. Not over-built. Not overloaded with features. The job of the site is to make an athlete confident enough to fill in a form and start a conversation with Ian.
The content strategy goes where competitor content can't. Recipes from the chef's nutrition plans. Route guides for the famous Cols. Interviews with the team. Chalet life in the moments between sessions. The strategy is anchored to specific pain points the audience is actively feeling. Dreaming of riding at the weekend during a Tuesday-evening commute. Just back from a club ride, looking for the next thing to train towards. Wanting a goal that justifies the time off work. The content meets the athlete in those moments and tells the Treacle story from inside them.
Treacle Velo is a triathlon training experience in the Alps for athletes who've already set the standards they expect from the rest of their lives. A chalet, not a hotel. A chef, not a buffet. A team that trains alongside you, not a tour operator that hands you a route sheet. The bike, swim and run are all world-class because the people running them know exactly what world-class feels like.
