Seventy Seven Collective has been much more than a marketing partner for The Hockey Barn. From the beginning, Darrell and the team have helped us take a vision and turn it into a brand that people understand, connect with and want to be part of. What I value most is that they don't simply execute what we ask them to do. They challenge our thinking, bring ideas to the table and operate as a true extension of our team. Together, we've introduced an entirely new concept to the market, built significant early interest and created a community around The Hockey Barn before we even opened our doors. I'm incredibly grateful for the partnership, friendship and the role 77 continues to play in what we're building."
Building a Hockey Brand for a Category That Didn’t Exist Yet
Engagement Focus
Brand strategy, voice and positioning, full website copywriting, social content strategy, pre-launch marketing
Project Overview
This hockey brand strategy case study breaks down how The Hockey Barn went from an idea with no category to a fully branded, membership-ready hockey ecosystem.
The Hockey Barn is a membership-based synthetic ice hockey ecosystem built for players, families, and adult players in North Atlanta. There was no existing category to borrow language from and no comparable brand nearby to study. Seventy Seven Collective was brought in before the doors opened to build the brand from the ground up, including voice, website, and the content strategy needed to sell memberships to a concept nobody had seen before.
The Challenge
The Hockey Barn was not entering a market with an established playbook. It is a synthetic ice facility built on a membership model, which meant it did not fit neatly into the language people already use for hockey. Traditional rinks sell ice time by the hour. Training academies sell lessons by the session. The Hockey Barn does neither, and every early draft of the website copy kept sliding back into that transactional language simply because there was nothing else to reach for.
That gap created a real risk. If the website and social content sounded like a rink, prospects would price-shop it against rinks and never see the membership model, the coaching included with every tier, or the community the founders were actually building. The brand needed language of its own before it could sell anything, and that language had to work across five very different buyers at once: competitive travel players, hockey parents, adult league players, and total newcomers who had never touched a stick.
The team also had to write and structure an entire site, including new pages like an NHL STREET operator page and a local player directory, without final pricing or program dates locked in. That meant building funnels that could convert interest into action without ever promising a date or number the client could not yet honor.
THE SOLUTION
Seventy Seven Collective started by naming the thing before writing a word of website copy. The Barn, The Barnyard, The Lab, reps, puck touches, battles: this vocabulary became the backbone of every page, every caption, and every internal brief so the brand voice stayed consistent long after the strategy documents were closed. Three pillars, Train, Compete, and Belong, gave every piece of content a home and gave the client a simple filter for anything they wrote themselves going forward.
From there, the team built out full website copy across Membership, Experience, About, and Events, plus two standalone acquisition pages built for audiences the core site was not designed to capture. The NHL STREET page was written with a slightly looser, more public voice since it functions as a top-of-funnel entry point rather than a member-facing page, and its call to action was built around an interest list instead of registration since program details were still being finalized. A local player directory was structured with placeholder cards so the client could populate it with real Atlanta hockey talent once the community started forming.
The system was built to do more than launch a website. Every persona, every page, and every social caption ties back to the same three pillars and the same vocabulary, which means the client can keep producing content long after the initial build without drifting back into rink language. The brand is now positioned to scale from Founding Member interest into a lasting Atlanta hockey community, one that sounds like itself on every channel it shows up on.
Results & Metrics
+600
Interested potential customers sign up for updates in the first 30 days
60 Days
Founding Memberships Sold Out
+50.2%
Facebook Community Growth Month Over Month
2000
Instagram Followers in 60 Days
Kyle Kinzie
Founder
Our Solutions
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