- A Trademark Fight -
The Brief
The club had applied for trademark protection for its original logo but this had been rejected by the authorities due to the name and logo not being unique enough.
Epilog were commissioned with the specific brief: to design a new brand identity that was a similar as possible to the logo that had been in use for the previous 20 years, while at the same time ensuring that it was unique enough to be granted trademark protection.
The Approach
There were a number of constraints to the design brief within which we had to operate. “Islington Boxing Club” is a phrase incorporating a place name and as such it was not able to be protected in its own right.
The way the logo was written, simply using standard fonts with a slight curve and an underline was also deemed insufficiently unique to be protected on its own. This meant that the only way for the club to be able to gain protection would be to add some additional design elements to the logo which would brand it unmistakably exclusive to the boxing club.
After a look through the history of the club it was decided that the addition of the phrase “Est 1974” embedded in the logo would be one step to making adding the required individuality, however a graphic flourish was still required. This was delivered by the addition of a boxing club (with IBC branding on the wrist) in the middle of the “O” of Islington.
The Result
The newly submitted design was accepted by the UK trademark association and the club were successfully granted IP protection on their new logo.
It is now in the process of being rolled out across the whole club.
Bookings System Software
Islington Boxing Club is one of largest and most successful amateur boxing clubs in the UK with over 2,500 boxers on its membership list.
Many of its boxers have gone on to fight for England or their nation of origin and a select few have won medals at the Commonwealth and even the Olympic Games.
The Brief
The Covid-19 crisis of 2020 proved a significant challenge for the boxing club. As a building that had traditionally squeezed as many athletes as possible into their gym, the reopening from the first lockdown proved a challenge to deal with.
Social distancing measures meant that club was only legally allowed to have less than 50% of its usual attendance and the long-standing method of having people to turn up and pay on the door before training would no longer be viable.
If classes were not busy enough then the cost of being open would outweigh the revenue generated and if the classes were too busy then many boxers would be turned away at the door – some after having travelled a very long way to get there. What was required was an automatic booking system that would allow users to both pre-book and pre-pay, so that they knew they had a place in the class and the club knew that they had a guaranteed revenue coming in.
The Approach
The project had two key requirements – a system that was easy to use for customers and club management and a seamless transaction processing system that ensured that payments were easily processed and infrequently rejected.
At Epilog we do not believe in reinventing the wheel and so the decision was taken to implement an open-source e-commerce engine to provide the back-end delivery system for the bookings site. This would have the advantage of speeding the project up and keeping the client price low. By adapting this software we were able to give IBC the flexibility to cover all the necessary elements of their class bookings: the dates, the prices, the amount of people that could attend and how far in advance customers were able to book. From the customer point of view we were able to deliver a clear system that they all found easy to use.
For the payment gateway, we implemented a number of different providers before settling on Stripe who had consistently delivered a more reliable service than their rivals.
The Results
Islington Boxing Club were delivered a bookings system that they relied on to keep the doors open throughout the pandemic.
The system allowed them to ensure that they had enough customers for every session for that session to remain profitable and the format that required payment being made in advance ensured that the club received their full revenue per customer even if the customer did not turn up for the session. It also meant that the club had a full list of verified contact details for customers should the Track and Trace system need to be implemented.
The booking system ensured that it was possible for the club to continue to operate during the Covid pandemic and proved so successful that thy plan to keep it in place as the default bookings and payment system even once the pandemic is over.
Islington Boxing Club was established nearly 50 years ago in 1974 and is now one of largest and most successful amateur boxing clubs in the UK with over 2,500 boxers on its membership list.
Many of its boxers have gone on to fight for England or their nation of origin and a select few have won medals at the Commonwealth and even the Olympic Games.
As the club has grown bigger and more popular this has opened up new revenue streams for the club – from offering recreational boxing training to private 1-2-1 sessions with professional coaches and also selling branded materials such as t-shirts and hooded tops.
