Top 10 Entrepreneurs from French-speaking Switzerland: Portrait 3/10 - Arnaud, co-founder of Paleta Loca
This summer, Arnaud took four days off, just four, in the middle of a season he describes as very intense and set to run at full speed until February.
One weekend stood out that summer: the festival the brand put on in the middle of nowhere to celebrate its tenth anniversary. Saturday was sold out, about fifty tickets were left for Friday, and just over a thousand people made the trip. All the feedback was positive, and every artist left thanking Paleta Loca, which Arnaud sums up simply: “It was crazy.”
Yet what struck us most in the interview wasn’t what the brand chooses to show, but what it chooses to keep quiet. Paleta Loca makes around 450,000 ice pops a year, all by hand, and it has stopped putting that forward. When we ask him why, Arnaud answers without hesitation: “We’d rather not talk about it.”
A name that opens every door
For Arnaud, Loca doesn’t describe the product, it describes the brand, and that word gives them the freedom to try crazy things and not take themselves too seriously. He even thinks they could push further in that direction, though it’s harder than it looks when you don’t want to put yourself in the spotlight. At first, people thought they were completely mad, and today that same word serves as a compass. It covers the campaign “Yann Sommer’s favourite ice pops.” The idea: find a real person who shares the name of the Swiss international footballer, a logistics worker from Lausanne, and make him the brand’s ambassador, with an asterisk clarifying who he is. Released only on digital channels, the campaign is set to evolve and grow over the coming months. It also covers the festival held in the middle of nowhere.
A name that gives permission to be bold is worth more than a slogan.
The product at the centre
From the start, Arnaud and his partner Benoît thought of Paleta Loca as a brand rather than just a product, while recognising that you can’t build a good brand without a good product and that the two move forward together. The decisive choice lies elsewhere: they put the product at the centre of the brand rather than their own faces, and they have always made their values the common thread of their marketing.
Those values come at a cost. At first, people asked what a paleta was, and today eight or nine Swiss brands make them too. Faced with that competition, Arnaud doesn’t talk about what others might copy, but about the choices they made: local, local fruit, the path of organic and vegan, a premium product made by hand, because you might as well stand out. Vegan is the real constraint, much harder to pull off than a recipe based on cream and milk, but it’s a strategic choice, since vegan alternatives remain rare in the ice cream market.
A brand stands out through what it agrees to make difficult.
A « mini player »
Paleta Loca is now sold at Coop, at Manor and on Migros online, and when we ask what they were asked to change to get in, the answer is surprising: “We were never asked to change a single thing.”
Arnaud draws no certainty from it, though, because he knows what game the brand is playing: “We’re the mini player.” Its competitors are the ice creams you find everywhere on the street or by the lake, and brands like Ben & Jerry’s in the shops, and it still has to keep proving itself and carving out its own path.
Save the flavors
Paleta Loca sees itself as a brand committed to sustainability, hence the brand activation with ID Watches Geneva. Its message is one the brand could not have carried alone: Save the flavors, to talk about global warming. They handed out watch-shaped ice pops, designed special packaging and, for a whole year, every chocolate ice pop sold at Coop carried a QR code giving a chance to win an ID Watches Geneva watch.
An ice pop brand and a watch brand talking about the same subject, each in its own world.
The word they stopped saying
There’s something remarkable about Paleta Loca: every ice pop is still made by hand. The machines are bigger than at the start, but the process is exactly the same, with 1,000-litre batches where they used to make 20, for around 450,000 handmade ice pops a year. Early on, they put that craftsmanship front and centre, but they know that one day they will have to semi-industrialise, so they prefer not to build their communication on a promise that might change.
An honest brand only promises what it knows it can keep tomorrow.
The little sister
The current challenge is seasonality: there are a dozen of them in summer and about four off-season, and their production space sits unused four months a year. To address this, they are preparing a little sister that carries the same values under a different brand: La Fruttaloca, which no one knows anything about yet. We received their permission to give you a first look!
The idea extends the paleta one. They went into ice pops because the existing offer seemed too chemical to them, and they want to do the same with fruit juice: a healthy competitor, with real fruit and real values, for the juice pouch you take with you whenever and wherever you want, and which everyone knows isn’t ideal to give a child. They add good fibre to counter the blood sugar spike, and the launch is planned soon.
Without making it a slogan
Arnaud and Benoît put the product at the centre rather than their faces, they chose vegan, the most demanding constraint, and they decided to stop putting handmade forward because they don’t know if that promise will always hold.
When we think back to the festival, in the middle of nowhere, with its thousand people and its artists all thanking an ice pop brand, we understand what a name that allows boldness can achieve when it rests on a demanding product and measured promises.
“We’d rather not talk about it.”
This portrait is part of the series “10 entrepreneurs from French-speaking Switzerland who turned their brand into a weapon,” produced by DARE, a branding and consulting agency based in French-speaking Switzerland.
