Welch Fitness: a rebrand built around "leave your ego at the door"

Welch Fitness is a family-run gym in Crickhowell with a clear point of view: leave your ego at the door, do the work. They came to us with the idea for a rebrand. We took it the rest of the way.

"I can't recommend team Alchemy enough. We went to them with an idea for our rebrand and they did all the rest. Super professional, friendly and knowledgeable. The best in their field by a mile. We are over the moon with what the team have done for us."

The outcome

A complete rebrand for Welch Fitness, built from a brand discovery workshop and rolled out across visual identity, motion, social and brand guidelines. The brand now does the recruiting and retention work for the gym, before anyone even walks through the door.

Delivered:

• Brand Discovery Workshop
• Copywriting and tone of voice
• Visual identity (logo, type, colour, applications)
• Brand guidelines document
• Motion graphics for social
• Social media templates and launch assets

The challenge

Welch Fitness opened in 2019 in Crickhowell, founded by Lewis Welch and Natalie Davies. The gym deliberately positions itself away from the mirror-walled, trend-chasing fitness category. The focus is functional training, fundamentals, consistency.

The brief was to build a brand that matched. Not a logo and a colour palette. A whole identity system that carried the mantra ("leave your ego at the door and challenge your potential") across every touchpoint.

The community Welch Fitness wanted to build was specific: people who'd done other gyms, found them shallow, and wanted somewhere harder and more honest. The brand needed to signal that to the right people, and (just as importantly) screen out everyone else.

Our approach

We started with the Brand Strategy Workshop. Lewis, Natalie and the team in a room for a focused session, working through positioning, audience, voice, and the values they wanted the brand to embody. That session is the source of every design decision that came after.

Key creative decisions:

• A bold, restrained colour system. Not the saturated brights typical of fitness branding. Something that reads as serious without being severe.
• Typography with weight. A type system that holds its own across long-form copy, in-gym signage, and small-format social.
• Visual language built around effort. Photography direction and motion treatment that show real training, not idealised bodies.
• Tone of voice carrying the mantra. Every piece of copy reinforces "leave your ego, do the work". Across welcome emails, signage, social captions and class names.

What changed for them

The brand is doing the upfront work. Prospective members arrive already understanding what kind of gym Welch Fitness is, which means the conversation at the door is shorter and the people who join are the right ones. Retention compounds from there.

Beyond the visuals, the team has a system. Brand guidelines they can hand to any new collaborator. Templates they can use without breaking the look. A point of view they can express consistently every time they post.

Credits

• Client: Welch Fitness
• Founders: Lewis Welch, Natalie Davies
• Studio: Alchemy