Snowdon Mountain Railway
Steaming ahead with Snowdon Mountain Railway’s brand and website.
Client
Heritage Great Britain
Industry
Travel & Tourism
Services
Brand Strategy
Branding
Brand Guidelines
Website
Video
Photography
Reaching the summit of Snowdon was once reserved only for the brave, but Snowdon Mountain Railway – owned and operated by Heritage Great Britain – now offers unlimited access to everything the mountain has to offer, including its famous breathtaking views. But despite being in business for more than 120 years, this iconic railway’s brand and website needed a fresh new look to attract the attention of prospective visitors.
Getting to the heart of what makes Snowdon Mountain Railway unique with brand strategy.
One of our first challenges was to get to the heart of what makes Snowdon Mountain Railway truly unique. Lucky for us, we had plenty to go off, with decades of employee memories, hundreds of years of history and thousands of visitor reviews. We distilled all this insight and developed a new brand strategy that clarified the attraction’s purpose and values, defined its identity and crafted a proposition to act as the throughline for all marketing and communications.
With the brand strategy getting everybody on the same page, the next task for us was to improve the overall look and feel of Snowdon Mountain Railway’s brand. The current mark had been around for such a long time that it was starting to feel dated, but it also carried a lot of heritage and prestige. For this reason, we knew the current mark had to stay, but it was clear the attraction needed a more modern identity with a flexible mark that works in a digital-first world.
We set about evolving the brand identity by cleaning up the existing primary logo to make it easier to work with and bring it into the twenty-first century without losing its heritage feel. We also created a separate secondary mark inspired by the windows from the first carriages to supplement the main identity and be used in communications where the primary logo is especially hard to read, for example, on social media.
Evolving the brand identity and developing a new brand language for a digital-first world.
Taking the brand evolution one step further, we developed a new brand language for Snowdon Mountain Railway to complement the updated logo mark, giving a nod to the mountain’s myths and legends, as well as recognisable Welsh iconography and symbols. Finally, we brought all of this together in comprehensive brand guidelines and rolled it out across the attraction’s entire suite of materials, from retail merchandise, signage and adverts through to brochures, leaflets and posters.
Creating a world-class website to take the Snowdon Mountain Railway experience to a whole new level.
After solving Snowdon Mountain Railway’s brand challenges, we turned our attention to the website. The mountain railway experience is truly unforgettable, and with 130,000+ visitors every year, it’s clear to see why it’s one of the most popular tourist attractions in Wales. But the website had a lot of catching up to do. Basic, outdated and prone to hacks, the site was failing to reflect the world-class experience customers get in person.
We set out to simplify the existing website, restructuring and streamlining the sitemap and cutting out any unnecessary content to improve the overall user experience and let the mountain’s breathtaking imagery take centre stage. The redesign succeeded in creating a fresher and more modern look and feel while still staying true to the railway’s heritage and traditions, with clever use of parallax scrolling, unique illustrations and a new homepage lifestyle video all helping to take the site to a whole new level.
All in all, Snowdon Mountain Railway’s brand has never been stronger. Even after centuries of history, we’ve managed to make this popular attraction thrive in our modern, digitally-driven world and introduced it to many more visitors who have yet to experience it for themselves.