Overview

For over a hundred years, the Ontario Veterinary Medical Association supported veterinary professionals across Ontario in continuing education and establishing industry best-practices. While their leadership in economic and techonological spaces was clear to all, their increasingly diverse membership needed something more: a community-centred brand that could make space for human connection and meaningful representation. Put simply, the mental image of what a veterinarian looks like had fallen out of alignment with who was actually filling the roles and something had to change. On top of everything else, the COVID-19 pandemic had thrown the entire veterinary industry into a mental health crisis, so OVMA took action and brought Harc in to help break up the clouds and shine some new light on their organization.

Helping any organization rediscover itself through a values and rebranding process is what our dreams are made of. From the beginning, Jarren and Parker were all the way in: how could we not jump at an opportunity to hang out with animal lovers? As luck would have it, we got to meet a lot of them. Through a series of segmented focus groups, interviews with sister organizations, broad surveying and on-site visits to veterinary clinics, we gained a tremendous appreciation for the sector’s strengths and challenges. Next, we attended OVMA’s first post-pandemic membership conference in Downtown Toronto to get an embodied sense of how their organization organically behaves (we also learned how a cat gets neutered, but that’s a story for a different day). By taking a broad yet engaged stance in our work, we gained an innate appreciation for the nuance involved in shifting this historic organization’s brand platform, but each conversation we had affirmed the significance and appropriateness of the forthcoming change.

“Parker, Jarren, and the Harc team take pride in their genuine interest in the organizations and people they partner with. To spend time to fully understand the unique needs of individuals and the organizations they represent has been vital in getting this work done right, while enjoying the process as it progresses.”

– John Stevens, CEO, OVMA

What We Did From There

With clarity and alignment in-hand, our next step was to craft a new set of values for OVMA that would steer their organization in its ongoing operation and serve as the North Star in our work on OVMA’s new visual identity. We took a layered approach to the design, interweaving Ontario’s agricultural past, its lake geography, indigenous ways of knowing, animal anatomy, and the letter ‘O’ to create something truly remarkable. Once aligned around their values and newly-minted logo, veterinarians within the organization experienced a renewed interconnectedness and began re-engaging its leadership. 

Since our collaboration wrapped, Ontario Veterinary Medical Association has seen its membership grow and its events reinvigorated. While their previous brand felt constricting and unclear, OVMA’s new identity has empowered a fresh generation of veterinarians to lean in. By cracking open their dated brand and imagining something new, OVMA came back to life.