Rebranding Your Company: The Exciting and Oh Shit! Moments
A look behind the scenes of how we developed the new Let’s Do This brand
I’ll always remember the feeling of tearing around Universal Studios with my brothers when we were younger — we could barely contain our excitement going on ride after ride, with mum and dad being dragged along. We were having the time of our lives. Then we got to the big new ride — some ridiculous movie elevator contraption that promised a terror drop. None of my brothers would go on the ride. They bottled it. Being the oldest I decided that I was obviously fine to go alone, what’s the worst that could happen? So I queued with strangers and went on the ride by myself. So exciting, so nervous, sweaty palms, stomach dropped, may have also farted and screamed as we dropped several hundred feet. But 10 seconds later we were down. We were safe. And it was actually a pretty amazing experience.
While not wanting to pile in on the world of cringe-worthy metaphors, I’m going to do it anyway— rebranding your company is a lot like jumping on the Terror Drop — although maybe without the farting. Fortunately, our team at Let’s Do This were lucky enough to go through this experience recently under the guidance of branding agency, Nomad — a down to earth bunch who work with the likes of Premier League, Disney, and Nike. When going over a recap of the experience with our team on the eve of our launch I shared 5 memories which will stay with me:
- Company therapy
- Saying goodbye to the past
- Getting comfortable
- Fontgate 2021
- Sprints on sprints on sprints
It Begins with Company Therapy
We loaded Nomad up with every scrap of documentation from user segmentation and product vision, to sales materials and marketing campaigns — all of which confirmed we were called Let’s Do This and we sell tickets to running, cycling, triathlon, and obstacle events — but also provided evidence that our brand lacked personality and any sense of cohesion. We then proceeded to fill Nomad’s diaries with interviews with our team, customers, and advisors. We hoped if we loaded them up with our collective feelings they could start to see and untangle who we really are, our culture, and what mattered to us.
Once they were up to speed on all things us, we started doing workshops to talk about our hopes and dreams — our goal was to come up with our creative strategy, which is a fancy way of saying what idea did we want to stand behind — to shape our brand over the next 10 years and beyond. For Apple, they want us to ‘Think Different’ and select their products, Airbnb want us to feel that we can ‘Belong Anywhere’ — for us, we want to tell the world that ‘Moments Make Us’ — that our lives, our characters, and memories are are richer for the moments we experience…like the buzz you get from running your first 5k race with friends.
Saying Goodbye to the Past
When we landed on ‘Moments make us’ we needed to understand how it would work with our company name, so Nomad developed some messaging frameworks to show how advertising executions could work. Through the process of doing this we encountered some casualties. First, we dropped ‘Epic’ from our vocabulary — a word that has been ingrained in our culture from the beginning — we dropped it because it felt ambiguous and tonally didn’t fit with the inclusive tone of voice we aspired to have. Next was the infamous underscore featured in our previous logo. To be honest, there were always ideas around how to use it ie: Let’s Swim This, but we never did. And when we started looking at visual identity routes to bring moments to life, we looked at a route that featured a framing device to be used across event photography and video. The route was well polished, but at best it was a clever graphic treatment and didn’t get at heart of what we’re about.
Fortunately, Nomad was onto this and presented a really compelling alternative approach which we fell in love with. The approach ‘The voice of the people’ honours the ideas and rituals of the communities around endurance sports. Inspired by the signs we make to support our friends when they are participating at events: the bold hand-written messages, the vibrant coloured card, and tape that holds it altogether. This had an authentic feel that felt right. A promising direction to shape our new visual identity around.
Getting Comfortable in our New Skin
As we began exploring how our visual identity would translate across our product and marketing we were working with a palette of 4 vibrant colours. The more we looked at this, the more we spoke about selecting a primary colour for us to lead with — one that we would make us distinct, and recognised by, in the same way turquoise works so well for Deliveroo. This would be an important part of our identity as we looked to cut through in a growing market of online marketplaces that are selling offline experiences.
We quickly moved on a yellow and dubbed it Volt Yellow to help people identify with it, and to signify its important role for us. As you can imagine, with a team of 70 people there were some mixed feelings — for some they felt energised at the prospect of going all in on Volt, and for others it was a bold choice they weren’t comfortable with at first. The more we developed applications to show how it would be used alongside content and across product, the more people started to feel good. This coupled with some members of the team wearing volt running shorts at events, and encouraging feedback we got from people in the UK and US via usertesting.com helped assure people that our bold approach had legs — Arguably the crowning moment for Volt was Michaela Cole’s dress at Emmys a couple of weeks back. We could be onto something here.
Fontgate 2021
The typography in our new visual identity evolved from the hand drawn look we referenced from community signs — towards a more modern aesthetic that would help us deliver key messages across touch points for consumers and event organisers. We landed in a place that saw us combine a serif font called Ogg with a Sans Serif, Pilat, a font we were also using in our new logo. This felt promising and the juxtaposition of the two styles had an edge that created an energy when applied across applications.
We ran with this direction as we started translating the identity across our products. But we missed an important step, which turned out to be a bit of a cock-up. 10 days out from our day 1 launch — we saw the painful truth that Ogg was struggling for readability on our mobile app, and worst still it failed accessibility tests. It was pretty stressful knowing we had dropped the ball here, and the pressure was definitely on as we needed a font that would work for everyone, on every touchpoint. Fortunately we managed to perform font olympics in collaboration with Nomad and explored alternatives that would give us the attitude and character we found in Ogg — A number of explorations later, we found our way to a Sans Serif called Bossa. We love it, and very fittingly it’s designed to channel the attitude of a character called Bossa in Brazilian culture.
Sprints on Sprints on Sprints
Like many tech companies we have mission orientated teams that work in sprint cycles to develop our products. So as a team we are used to working in time constraints to help us focus on learning and move quickly. What we aren’t used to is working on rebrand design and development sprints in parallel to our regular sprints, with an additional new business sprint thrown in for good measure.
At first we put together a small group of designers and engineers to get things going, in collaboration with Nomad, whilst everyone was cranking on their team work, and then as designs started coming together each of our teams started planning development for the priority product, marketing, and sales touch points we wanted to launch on day 1. The short answer here is we survived, but it was definitely a colourful few weeks as our team’s oriented themselves from their missions to the rebrand effort in order to devise and test an initial set rules that would inform how we’d apply our new brand.
We did our first call with Nomad on May 18 and 130 days later we launched the first version of our new brand on September 27. That’s pretty fast. Day 1 of the new brand has arrived and is something we are really proud of — next up we are going deeper on our tone of voice, and content mapping to see how we can improve how we use photography and video across the customer journey. We can’t wait to keep building on Moments make us.
Do you know someone who would love to design a product to inspire people to experience amazing moments? If you do, please let them know we’re hiring a Senior Product Designer and we’d like to chat — dom@letsdothis.com
