The Call of the Cold

It was a balmy May day when PWHL Minnesota defeated Boston on the road to win the league’s inaugural championship, sending a chill through the Tsongas Center. When homegrown star Taylor Heise was named playoff MVP and hoisted the Walter Cup, the Lake City-born former Golden Gopher painted a picture of the yet-unnamed team’s identity. Light glinting off the sharp edges of the silver Tiffany-designed championship trophy and the game-worn skate blades. Deep purple lettering. A winter-white jersey. Shards of rink ice shavings clinging to the toes of the skates.

All those winning elements come together in the team’s new name and identity, which the PWHL unveiled earlier today: Introducing your Minnesota Frost.

After playing last season known as PWHL Minnesota, the team will skate into season two with a name and logo that personifies it. “Minnesota seizes the cold,” says Amy Scheer, PWHL’s Senior Vice President for Business Operations, about the new identity. “It’s more than lifestyle, it’s identity. In name, tone, and spirit, Frost does it all.” 

Far from a bleak warning, “winter is coming” draws cheers in Minnesota. Here, when temperatures drop, spirits rise. The Land of 10,000 Lakes becomes the Land of 10,000 Rinks. Kids take their first steps on skates. Warm bonds among friends, family, and teammates are forged with sticks in hand when your breath is visible.

Not unlike how frost can hit overnight, the Frost name, logo, and visual identity was developed and refined in under a year under a very compressed timeline. However, “we took the time, care, and craft to get this right,” says Alastair Merry, co-founder and chief creative officer at Flower Shop, the New York-based creative agency tapped by the PWHL to help develop team names and identities. “These are the best players in the world. Our work had to be on that level.” 

The exhaustive process drew on player and fan interviews, game analysis of both the on-ice action and the crowd reaction, and research into names—countless names in every sport and every level of competition. Ultimately, a list of strong name options was developed, each hitting on essential aspects of the North Star State—its love of the outdoors, its wintry beauty, and its unsurpassed passion for hockey. When it came to winnowing the possibilities down, the expected legal and copyright minefields claimed a number of options. Fortunately, Frost emerged unscathed from the arduous intellectual property process. 

One primary consideration was the name’s visual potential as a logo that would live on hats and goalie helmets, Bauer jerseys, and billboards, frozen into center ice and animated on screens large and small. While the name pays homage to Minnesota’s cold-weather climate, the Frost logo is anything but chilled out—it needed a speedy, fierce edge that evokes the team’s championship-level play. “On the ice, this is a ferocious team,” says Merry, who oversaw Flower Shop’s design process. “We wanted a logo that matched the team’s intensity.”. Ultimately, they developed a forward-charging “F” with two-tone purple shading and snow-white borders with sharply pointed icicles on its edges. “The kind that might slice people in half,” Merry jokes.

The primary choice for the colorway was never in question—Minnesota is a state where purple reigns, after all. But the designers spent long nights trying to ensure the shades they used reflected the team name. Purple ice wasn’t a thing, so they made it one, tweaking the hero primary purple to a cool purple tone using blue hues. They then accented it with lilac, which gave the effect depth and dimension, and framed the logo with icy blues and blizzard whites. The overall effect is powerful in its simplicity. 

The big reveal came when Scheer introduced the Frost and the PWHL’s other team names to the world on Good Morning America earlier today. “It gives us another moment to be really proud about who we are, what we stand for, and the work we’re doing,” Scheer notes. “As our league evolves, there will be more big moments, but this one, to me, is a game changer because your identity means everything.”

Going into the process, the league had one non-negotiable for the team name and identity: it had to capture the soul of the place and its people. “In Minnesota, hockey comes first,” says Kanan Bhatt-Shah, the league’s Vice President of Brand and Marketing, who led the naming and identity process. “It’s Friday Night Lights on ice.” The sport is imprinted on Minnesotans’ DNA, which shows in the state’s expansive youth hockey culture and the passions that run high on both sides of the glass at Xcel Energy Arena. “If you’re a player, you love being on the ice,” says Jayna Hefford, Hockey Hall of Fame inductee and the PWHL’s Senior Vice President of Hockey Operations. “You welcome the cold and the winter. It means you get to do what you love.” 

Capturing that emotion wasn’t easy, however. “It was a hard process but a labor of love,” Scheer says. “We all felt the pressure to have these identities match the level of the hockey we put on the ice.” Nowhere was the challenge greater than in Minnesota, which holds bragging rights as the best team in the league and the 35-pound silver Tiffany trophy to prove it.

For decades, Minnesota has been known as the State of Hockey.  And as of today,  the state of hockey in Minnesota is cooler than cool—it’s The Frost. 

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