Katherine Howe is a rehabilitative movement practitioner and provider based in Lexington, Kentucky. She’d run her business part-time for over 10 years and was ready to take it full-time! With a background that includes dance, Pilates, physical therapy, Katherine is uniquely setting her up to offer holistic, personalized private sessions to her clients. These sessions can incorporate movement, breathing technique, exercise, movement habits, and/or injury recovery work.

To really take her work to the next level, she needed a complete, professional visual identity for her business. And she needed a website that supported her professional goals. Blustery Day Design was happy to help her with both.

Finding a name

Katherine did some soul-searching and brain-storming to first come up with the perfect name for her now-full-time venture: Ravel Studio Pilates. The word “Ravel” really resonated with her: “Ravel is a word that actually has two meanings; it means to unravel too. Same thing. I work on “unraveling” by being presented with symptoms and taking time to find out the true cause of the symptoms. Then, because unraveling always brings up new things (good and not-so-good sometimes), things kind of get raveled again; it’s a complicated, sometimes messy, sometimes beautiful, sometimes complicated path.” What a perfect name for the mindful work she does!

Branding

Once she decided on the new, perfect name, Jessica got to work on the Ravel Studio Pilates identity. Katherine is a fan of color and natural materials, and she mentioned wanting a look that is “simply elegant”. We also learned that most of her current clients are women, but we didn’t want any men to feel un-welcome. After trying a few options, we made a branding palette that was colorful yet peaceful (and gender-neutral) with earthy browns, green, and purples.

For the logo itself, Jessica designed a simple representation of a coiled “string.” The final Ravel Studio Pilates logo really captures the spirit of the name Katherine chose and her philosophy for body movement work, while also scaling well for many print and digital applications.

Website content strategy & design

After we finalized the logo and color scheme, we began work on designing and developing a new website. Katherine diligently worked through our website worksheet to clarify that her target visitor audience was folks desiring a purposeful, gentle, mindful and holistic way to approach their individual body needs or problems. With that insight, now we could design the site with them in mind. We could provide Ravel Studio Pilate’s website visitors with ways to learn more about Katherine, the Pilates method, and her specific services.

Katherine’s previous and current clients had provided her some amazing testimonials that we sprinkled all throughout the site. These showed visitors the success others have had with Katherine’s services.

Jessica also consulted with Katherine on how she could best structure and write her content in order to accomplish her goals of being simple and clear, and inspiring her visitors with a positive body message of hope.

The final website now presents Katherine as the professional and knowledgeable holistic rehabilitative body movement worker that she truly is. It highlights and explains the services she provides through Ravel Studio Pilates. The site also easily allows visitors to contact her with inquiries. There are calls to action on every page that invite the visitors to take the next step in learning more or contacting Katherine.

The new website we built is now a beautiful home for Ravel Studio Pilates on the web. It incorporates the new logo and brand colors wonderfully. And it will support Katherine in growing her client work to new heights of success.

What Katherine had to say

“I know I can be effusive but being a “hopeless optimistic” is my approach to life! Jessica has terrific sensibilities; she is able to get artistic souls to take the time to put into words what they do – a daunting task for most. Her website development “forms” ask the right questions and leaves space for personal interpretation. It never felt “dry” or repetitive; it was just plain good work. Jessica was encouraging yet helped me stay on task – nice combination again, for people like me who prefer to spend time in their heads thinking about their work, but never taking time to really sit down and articulate their passion.

“It must be her artistic talent herself that helps her understand her clients; she is as creative as she is productive – wow! I could tell that she was excited about my project and was having fun developing my logo – which by the way I love.

“The feedback from viewers has been outstanding – almost everyone has used words like ‘beautiful’, ‘classy’, ‘professional’ and even ‘personal.’ To me that pretty much sums up Jessica and Blustery Day Design.”

Katherine Howe, Ravel Studio Pilates