Client: Gear Aid is a legacy outdoor brand known for gear repair, care, and longevity products trusted by outdoor enthusiasts worldwide.

Partnership Timeline: 2022–Present

Services

Brand Storytelling Audit & Strategy
Brand Storytelling Strategy & Management
Lifestyle Content Strategy & Production
Ambassador Program Strategy & Management
Campaign & Content Consulting

The Challenge

When Gear Aid engaged We Are Unicorns in 2022, the brand faced a familiar but critical challenge.

Social channels had been largely dormant for several years. While Gear Aid had strong brand equity and a loyal customer base, that story was not being actively expressed or reinforced through all of its digital channels. There was no documented content strategy, no consistent cadence, and no system guiding how brand, product, and community should show up together.

They needed a way to translate who they were into a sustainable marketing system.

Our Point of View

We do not treat social media as a posting problem. We treat it as a brand translation opportunity. Our role as Brand Storytelling & Content Strategists is to operationalize brand narrative and turn it into a repeatable, scalable system that supports engagement, performance, and long-term growth. With Gear Aid, the goal was not short-term spikes. It was durability.

Phase 1: Audit & Strategic Foundation

We began with a Brand Storytelling Audit & Strategy, with a focus on:

Brand narrative clarity and differentiation
Content pillars rooted in purpose, product, and community
Channel roles within the broader marketing ecosystem
Social media as a culture and community engine, not just a promotional channel

This phase resulted in:

A refreshed Content Marketing Mission
Clearly defined storytelling pillars
Channel-specific strategies and guardrails
A fully executable roadmap designed to be owned internally over time

This work created alignment and eliminated guesswork and reactive starts and stops.

Phase 2: Brand Storytelling Strategy & Management

With the strategy in place, we moved into Brand Storytelling & Content Management, acting as an extension of Gear Aid’s team.

Our focus was on:

Re-establishing consistent cadence across social channels
Producing lifestyle-driven content designed for how people actually engage on social
Showing the outdoor community what Gear Aid stands for beyond products
Establishing workflows, calendars, and internal processes

This phase rebuilt trust with the audience and gave the brand a reliable presence again.

Phase 3: Lifestyle Content as Narrative Infrastructure

Lifestyle content supported the strategy, not the other way around. We produced purpose-built content to:

Humanize the brand
Show products in real-world conditions
Create durable assets that could support ongoing storytelling

These assets became the backbone of Gear Aid’s owned narrative and set the tone for how community-generated content would later integrate.

Phase 4: Ambassador Program & Community Flywheel

As consistency and clarity took hold, the community responded.

We formalized this momentum through a Brand Ambassador Program designed to:

Extend Gear Aid’s narrative through real people and real use cases
Increase authentic UGC and third-party validation
Reduce long-term reliance on agency-produced content
Strengthen Gear Aid’s position within the outdoor community

Today, Gear Aid’s social channels are intentionally UGC- and ambassador-led, with approximately 75 percent of content coming from the community by design.

Performance & Measurable Impact

Brand storytelling is not a last-click channel, but its impact is measurable when evaluated correctly. With Gear Aid, performance showed up across engagement quality, operational efficiency, and ecosystem lift.

Social Channel Revival & Growth

Reactivated social channels after years of dormancy
Established consistent posting cadence and channel ownership
Achieved sustained follower growth and engagement relative to historical baselines
Shifted audience behavior from passive consumption to active participation

Engagement Quality Signals

Increased saves, shares, and comment depth on educational and lifestyle posts
Higher volume of tagged content and inbound brand mentions
Stronger engagement on content tied to real-world repair stories and field use

These signals indicated resonance, not just reach.

UGC & Ambassador-Led Scale

Transitioned from primarily brand-produced content to ~75% UGC and ambassador-led content
Built a scalable content engine driven by community participation
Increased content volume without increasing production burden

This was a strategic outcome, not an accident.

Ecosystem-Level Impact

Improved creative inputs across email, paid, and on-site content
Clearer messaging alignment between campaigns and organic channels
Reduced friction for performance marketing by strengthening brand signal
Increased efficiency in content planning and reuse

Organizational Impact

One of the most meaningful performance indicators was internal.

Gear Aid successfully hired an internal marketing coordinator
Execution transitioned in-house without loss of momentum
Our role evolved from execution partner to strategic advisor

This reflects a healthy agency-client evolution and a system that works.

Why These Metrics Matter

We do not position brand storytelling as a single KPI. Instead, it drives:

Higher engagement quality
Greater community participation
More efficient performance marketing
Stronger internal alignment
Marketing systems that scale with the business

Gear Aid’s results show what happens when story, process, and community reinforce one another.

The Outcome

This partnership is a model for how modern brand relationships should evolve.

We helped Gear Aid and their team:

Clarify their brand narrative
Build a repeatable content and community system
Transition execution in-house with confidence
Retain strategic continuity as the brand scaled

Gear Aid now owns a marketing engine built for longevity.

You can see the results reflected in their public presence:
https://gearaid.com
https://www.instagram.com/gearaid

Our Role

We Are Unicorns serves as Brand Storytelling Strategists for brands that care about durability, not shortcuts. We build the systems that allow performance marketing to work harder, teams to move faster, and brands to grow with integrity.

Gear Aid is proof that when story becomes infrastructure, growth follows.

Gear Aid: From Dormant Channels to Community-Led Growth [Case Study]