We Play Untamed — Chandler Burgess

A fifty-year institution, aging out of its own audience.

The shiftWe loosened Woodward's anchor to “action sports” without cutting the line — then rebuilt it as an experience brand with endless ways in. The flag we planted: reclaim untamed play.

at a glance / the facts

Client

Woodward · POWDR

Role

Creative Director · brand & creative lead, with the marketing team

Years

2018–2025

Disciplines

Positioning · Brand strategy · Creative platform · Campaign

Scope

Global — every property, every touchpoint

Partners

In-house team · Sasha Group (organic social)

01The setup

We Live This. A brand at its high-water mark.

In 2018–19, Woodward relaunched its positioning across every property, location, and touchpoint. The line was “We Live This,” and it was earned. Heather Driscoll and Mietra Byers built a platform that told the story of what camp actually felt like — backed by a show that ran on Fuel TV and YouTube.

Woodward had the right to say it. Fifty years at the front of action sports — skateboarding, BMX, snow, and more — and a reputation fans called the “Disneyland of action sports.” A dream park. Pro-grade facilities you couldn't find anywhere else on earth, run by world-class coaches and famous athletes.

But a brand is a promise about who you're for. And the world “We Live This” spoke to was about to change faster than the line could keep up.

02The disruption

Then the ground moved. Twice.

In 2020 the pandemic hit the camp world hard. Woodward made a hard call and reduced the offering. Gymnastics and cheer were the easiest audience we had — a cost per camper under ten dollars — but the model no longer held. We couldn't guarantee the safety of a room full of young athletes to the standard the moment demanded, and the profile never really fit the rest of the brand. In 2023 we formally sunset gym and cheer.

It was the right call and an expensive one. Camp struggled coming out of COVID and never fully regained its momentum. A proud brand settled into the kind of quiet decline that's hard to see from the inside, because everyone is still working hard.

Decline is the hardest thing to brand your way out of — because nothing looks broken.

03The drift

The kids changed. The pitch didn't.

Action sports itself was maturing, and the next generation just wasn't as into it. Something deeper had shifted, too. Kids used to identify by what they were into — I skate, so I'm a skater. Now they identify by who they are, and then all the things they do. The drive to be great at one thing gave way to the want to be good at many.

Woodward's whole story ran the other way. We were the place where, if you were good, you could become great. That promise had powered the brand for decades — and it stopped landing. Even the core was drifting: the kid who used to skate a few times a week now skated a few times a month.

So we were losing two things at once — momentum with the brand, and awareness with the young audience we were built for. You don't out-execute that with better ads. It's a positioning problem.

We were answering a question kids had stopped asking.

A muse, not a demographic

The audience work kept pointing at one person: the creative athlete — curious as much as committed, rewriting the rules of what “sport” can even look like. Not a segment to target. A muse to build toward.

04The reframe

Meet kids where they actually play.

The research kept returning the same verdict from parents and kids alike: play has lost its way. Free play is all but gone. Sport had gone sterile — all progression and skill-building, no room to just mess around. There was a whole tribe of what we started calling fun hunters, hunting the antidote to boring.

That was the opening, and it was already in our DNA. Action-sports culture was born to break the monotony — freedom with a little edge, structure that doesn't suffocate, learning how to fail as much as how to win. We didn't need a new soul. We needed to stop selling the badge and start offering the feeling.

So we made two moves. We loosened the anchor: Woodward would evolve from an action-sports company into an experience company — with action-sports attitude. And we planted a flag the whole company could rally to.

Woodward is on a mission to reclaim untamed play.

05The system

We Play Untamed. A platform, not a tagline.

“Reclaim untamed play” needed a system a whole company could run. We built the brand architecture end to end — growth driver, audience, opportunity, positioning — then gave it pillars, values, and a personality with a spine.

The pillars: wildly-uncommon experiences, boundary-defying programming, action-sports heritage, unity in community. The values run from “be fiercely curious” to “push it to the edge” to “no gatekeepers.” And the personality — the Unapologetic Instigator — is the part that keeps the writing honest: dedicated to the craft, but never gripping it too tight.

Then we made it playable. “We Play Untamed” became the creative platform — a manifesto, a headline bank, and a tone the whole org could actually write in. Play doesn't follow the rules. It rewrites them. Skateboarding taught us that, and every sport at Woodward borrows the edge.

Endless points of entry — brand activations

If action sports was a narrow front door, the experience brand is a building full of them — immersive spaces, pop-ups, community, and play.

What it made me

Repositioning isn't a new coat of paint — it's the nerve to change who you're for. I learned to hold a fifty-year brand's DNA in one hand and a generation's shifting idea of play in the other, and to build the flag both could rally to.