Pearl iZUMi
Pearl iZUMi came to Frank Works to re-energize its creative system and re-connect with a new generation of riders.
The task: modernize the brand’s voice and visual world while honoring its decades-deep performance heritage. Over two seasons, we built a 360° creative partnership, leading campaign production, content strategy, and monthly marketing execution across every channel.
Performance
Meets Emotion.
A multi-season brand partnership — from campaign production and content strategy to web optimization and always-on marketing.
The Brief
A brand that earned its stripes. And then got comfortable.
Pearl iZUMi has 75 years of innovation behind it. Riders trust it. Athletes have won in it. The gear has always worked. But trust isn’t the same as desire — and over time, as a new wave of cycling brands built culture as carefully as they built product, Pearl’s voice went quiet.
Not because the gear got worse. Because the story stopped moving.
They came to Frank Works to change that.
The Challenge
How do you out-emote brands built entirely on emotion?
You don’t out-trend them. Pearl iZUMi isn’t a coffee shop brand, and it shouldn’t pretend to be. Its advantage is real: decades of performance knowledge, gear that actually works, a rider community that spans road, gravel, and trail.
The challenge was reconnecting that heritage to something people feel — without making it feel nostalgic or stiff.
We had to stop selling apparel with tech features and start telling the truth: this is gear that supports athletic pursuit. It’s for the ride that changes your day. The training block that changes your year. The race that changes how you see yourself.
The brand’s job wasn’t to describe the product. It was to honor the journey.
The Approach
Gear doesn’t move people. What they do in it does.
We started by clarifying what Pearl iZUMi actually stood for — not features, not categories, but a belief: we’re moving forward, forever. That became the emotional spine everything else was built around.
From there we built the full brand expression. Cinematic seasonal campaigns set the tone. A modular design system made sure that tone held at every touchpoint — from a hero film to a banner ad to a weekly email drop. A shared Figma workflow kept Pearl iZUMi’s internal team and ours aligned and moving fast.
We didn’t just make things look better. We gave the brand a reason to say something.
The Work
Spring ’25 Campaign
Two seasons. One system. Every channel. Shot across road, gravel, and trail landscapes, the Spring ’25 campaign defined the brand’s new visual language. Frank Works delivered a hero film and stills, eComm imagery, short-form edits, and ad variations — all anchored to a single campaign platform.
The Work
Fall ’25 Campaign
A two-day on-location production captured the grit of late-season riding — wind, weather, and willpower. Hero imagery, 60-second films, and behind-the-scenes culture moments extended the brand’s new tone across the colder season.
Monthly Marketing System
We built a repeatable marketing engine that produced 200+ assets in Q1–Q2 2025 alone — emails, landing pages, paid ads, and social video. Modular templates ensured brand consistency while dramatically reducing turnaround time and keeping performance measurable week over week.
Web Experience
We optimized the Pearl iZUMi web experience to work as hard as the campaigns driving traffic to it — cleaner hero architecture, stronger collection pages, and a visual system that converted browsers into buyers.
Progress is a Direction
Instead of leading with features, the brand is reframed around the athlete—their movement, their focus, their relationship with the road. The gear becomes secondary: not the story itself, but what makes the story possible.
Every shot prioritizes momentum over material. Effort over explanation. The product is embedded in the experience, not pulled out for inspection.
The result is a more emotional, performance-driven narrative—one where Pearl Izumi doesn’t just make apparel, but equips athletes to push further.
