Why a Pandemic Is the Perfect Time to Rebrand
I’ve had many identities over the course of my life. I've been a star student and I've been a troublemaker. I was once a rabble-rouser but I'm growing into myself as a renegade. I love language, I love words, and I love the process of branding as a way to define who we are in this world.
While my personal brand identity has developed quite organically, some might be surprised to find out I've put a lot of effort and thought into my company's branding. There's something about taking a dose of your own medicine that's bittersweet, that makes you better at what you do, and truly allows you to put your skills to the test.
I decided some time last spring that the brand we had built, Fearless in Training, was not the brand we were evolving into. It became critical for me to sit down with my team and talk through who we wanted to become in this next chapter.
In the past three months alone, our business has grown threefold––from both a financial perspective and a staffing one. I wanted to update the values and vision for the company, since the expansion of our team meant expansion of our services. At a bare minimum, it felt pressing and pertinent that we update our website with language about who we’re here to serve and how we can help those people that choose to connect and collaborate with us.
It’s a Scary Process, Until It Clicks
There's no doubt that creating a new brand architecture is daunting. Having been through this myself recently, I can tell you there's a lot of anticipation and anxiety that goes into it before things start to click on the other side. But slowly, after months of writing copy on my own, something started to form into being.
We settled on a new brand name which we will be revealing soon, as well as new language to start talking about who we are and who we're here to serve. It meant a lot to get those words out of my head and onto paper, and even more to have them be absorbed and integrated into the ideas we shared as a team.
After this initial writing process, the name came to me––just like it always does, in an instant. With it came the key line of what we are truly here to say to the world, or in other words our new mission statement.
From there, we started thinking more about the visual identity of the brand and turned to one of our top, talented designers to translate our ideas and inspirations. Jasmine delivered us a beautiful mood board that has informed our font work, new color palette, a photo schema, our new logo, new business cards, and finally, our new website––coming very soon!
Does Branding Every Really End?
While the process is painstaking and can activate my inner design critics, it's also been beautiful to watch Jasmine's work unfold and get to see how excited it makes my team. From there, it was time to put on the finishing touches, stand back, and admire our work.
When we work on a brand change for a client, it’s easy to see the ending. However, we’ve discovered it’s a lot harder to know when and where the brand experience ends for ourselves––we love this process so much, we don't know where it starts and stops.
Luckily for us, we know some other amazing branding superstars who are deeply connected to their work. They reminded us that branding is not simply a one-time process, but a constant evolution. After listening to my dear friends, Emily and Misty lead a webinar for our audience, Emily and I sat down along with her business partner, Justin, and my team to tie all these pieces together.
Like a golden thread that called out our company story, Emily and Justin's creative hands weaved throughout the work we had done over the past six months to tie everything together in a beautiful bow. We walked away knowing how to speak about who we are, where we come from, and what we're here to do in this world.
The process left us awe inspired.
But Why Did We Choose Now for a Rebrand?
We're not doing it because we had to. Business has been booming and I couldn't be more grateful, but we committed to a successful rebranding because we're evolving. Quite frankly, our growth as a business has helped us get crystal clear about who we're here to serve––something about this crazy COVID world is telling us exactly who we're here to be.
We're rebranding to share our full story and to integrate the parts of us that had previously gone unnoticed or undervalued. We're doing it because we're expanding our services and the ways that we're working with female founders, ambitious entrepreneurs, and technology professionals from around the world.
We couldn't be more excited to rebrand, and a global pandemic was the perfect time to do it.
Rebranding made us take a critical look at the way we were doing things. It made us re-evaluate what we value and who we are. It made us realize that if we’re going to continue working during a global crisis in a digital age, it will only be with clients we love. It made us understand that we truly do have the power to design, to dig deep, and define who we will become as a business.
Proactive rebranding is a powerful process, one that made this wild, pandemic world a little sweeter––and made our team stronger. Although I might be a bit biased, I’d encourage anyone who's got the time and energy to give it a try.