The archive · Marketing & Growth · Marketing decision · 2024–2025
Montreal Roses FC builds its brand on an impossible blue rose — ADC 104 Best of Typography
Cossette and GRDN named Montreal's new pro women's club Roses and built a thorny variable typeface and blue-rose emblem that sold $100,000 before a match.
Montreal Roses FC (Les Roses FC de Montréal) · Cossette · GRDN
What it had to solve
Montreal was a passionate sports city with no professional women's football team. Ahead of the Northern Super League's April 2025 opening, founders Isabèle Chevalier and Jean-François Crevier wanted a name and brand strong enough to launch a movement — and to sell tickets before the first match.
How it works
Montreal has one of North America's most passionate sports cultures, yet no professional women's football team existed in the city. When Isabèle Chevalier and Jean-François Crevier founded a club to join Canada's new Northern Super League, which opened play in April 2025, they believed the gap was not a lack of interest but a lack of opportunity and visibility.
Their answer was to build a brand before building the team. Cossette and GRDN chose the name 'Roses' for the club, drawing on the rose in Montreal's floral emblem and the city's iconic Farine Five Roses sign. A blue rose — a flower that does not exist in nature — became the emblem, a symbol of making the impossible possible. A custom variable typeface inspired by thorny rose stems shifts from refined to bold, letting the club's voice adapt to game intensity.
The identity launched in October 2024 with a full brand system: red, blue and gold colors drawn from Montreal's sports heritage, a website with e-commerce, and the club's first branded clothing collection. The case reports $16,000 in ticket and merchandise sales in the first 24 hours and more than $100,000 in sales before any match was played, along with 100% positive media coverage.
ADC's 104th Annual Awards recognized the work as Best of Discipline in Typography/Lettering and gave it the Members' Choice Award, while the club reported 15 new investors and the retention of top homegrown talent. The identity had done its job: proving demand and building community before the team ever played.
Why it lands
- A flower that does not exist made the club's ambition — doing what Montreal had never done — visible in a single image.
- Rooting the typeface in the Farine Five Roses sign tied a brand-new team to local memory instead of generic sports styling.
- The variable font let one letterform be elegant and gritty at once, so the club's voice could shift with game intensity.
- Launching brand and merchandise before play turned supporters into customers, proving demand ahead of the first match.
What it did
The club's case reports $16,000 in ticket and merchandise sales in the first 24 hours and more than $100,000 in sales before a single match, 100% positive media coverage and 15 new investors; ADC 104 gave the work Best of Discipline in Typography/Lettering.
What you can take
Encode the ambition in the identity itself: a symbol of the impossible plus a letterform rooted in local heritage let a brand prove demand for a club before it ever played.
Since then
The Montreal Roses began play in the Northern Super League in April 2025. At ADC 104, the identity won Best of Discipline in Typography/Lettering and the Members' Choice Award voted by One Club members. Its launch numbers — recorded with no game yet played — made it a reference for treating a brand as the first product a club sells.
Sources
- Roses — ADC 104th Annual Awards winner
- The Montreal Roses: Women's soccer shows its thorns
- Montreal Women's Soccer Shows Its Thorns for Name Reveal Campaign
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