First of all I want to thank the entire Brthrs team and Paul van Excite for the tremendous hard work and the great result. YOU ROCK!

Brthrs is a small full service digital agency from Utrecht, the Netherlands. At the moment, we don’t have the manpower to let anyone in our team solely focus on internal elements such as rebranding. Nevertheless, we put our heads together and somehow found a way to accomplish this within 9 weeks. In this blogpost, I would like to elaborate on this process; the steps, tools, the do’s, & don’ts.

Why did we do a rebranding?

When Sebastiaan (co-founder of Brthrs) and I founded Brthrs in 2006, we primarily found our clients close to home, in the form of student associations, family members, and friends. In no time, we had out-grown our clientele base. Without a specific marketing strategy, we primarily gained new clients by word-of-mouth. Before we knew it, we were well known in the community as the two guys, Robert and Sebastiaan, alias: The Brothers, who designed and developed everyone’s websites and apps. Thus, Brothers Media was born.

After our graduation, our clients seemed to keep increasing in scale and respectability, while we still remained true to our “old” client base. Attending to our old clients is something that we find important. We believe that we should always care for all our clients, small, big, old, and new. Everyone should receive the same treatment and service, no matter what.

In 2013 we hired our first employee, so our team expanded from “Two Brothers” to ”Three”. This was a huge change in our internal organisation, communication, and management. Not only for Sebastiaan and myself, but our clients now also had to deal with this new, unknown, “scary” dude. Some clients even specifically requested that we work on the projects instead of our new trusted employee. We then realized that the name “Brothers Media” was connected to Sebastiaan and Robert (me), and not the (current) whole team: Sebastiaan, Robert, Jesper, Bjorn, and Boudewijn. Something needed to change.

Another reason for a possible rebranding, was that Brothers Media was founded in 2006, so we had already been active for 9 years. Our proposition in the market was not clear enough and didn’t fit in the target group we wanted to reach.

Change of name

Sebastiaan and I were thinking about changing our company name. This was even before a complete rebranding came to mind. Changing your company name is an emotional and creative process that takes a lot of time. Our quest for the “perfect” (new) name took us over three months. So as a word of advice, if you decide to change your name, you should think about it before starting with the rebranding project.

Why Brthrs, instead of Brothers Media?

We wanted to get rid of the “Media” part. Everybody called us Brothers and we also weren’t a “Media” company. So we decided to continue just as Brothers.

Secondly, Brothers was too similar to the multinational “Brother”.

But we really liked the name “Brothers” a lot and wanted to keep it part of our identity. So we decided to remove the vowels.

So people see Brthrs, but read Brothers.

Defining a focus

We already decided to change our name, so what’s left? The second important thing before you can start with the creative stuff is to define your focus. Defining our focus was one of the hardest and most important things in our entire rebranding. We wanted clients to see us as the “Professional” in a certain market. First, we were the Brothers who operated in all markets and (in our opinion) were the professionals in all markets, but this is a utopian view. We needed a target group and wanted to position ourselves as the professional in this market. Most of the things you do and who you are should be connected with this focus. Nevertheless, we believe there should also be space for your team to conduct experimental and out of the box.

We used Simon Sinek’s philosophy to define our focus. Basically this answers the following questions:

• What do you do?
• How do you do this?
• Why do you do the things you are doing?

So define the following things to attain focus:

• What do you do?
• How do you do this?
• Why do you do the things you are doing?
• Define a target group
• Define a market
• Define a mission

The first rebranding meeting

The first meeting was really important for the creative process. The most important thing we did in this meeting was brainstorming the rebranding direction and ultimate result. We asked ourselves the following question: “What do we want to have at the end of our trek?”.

We defined the following:

• New style (Typography, Colors, etc)
• Logo
• Website
• Change of the office
• Quotations/Invoices
• Business cards
• Photography (Office, Team, etc.)
• Merchandising
• Newsletter
• Focus

Define a product owner! Otherwise you won’t make it!

The second question we answered in the first meeting was: “Who will be the owner/safeguard of the rebranding?” We made one person responsible for the project management, planning etc.

This person was indispensable for safeguarding our tight planning.

Thirdly, we decided that the whole team would be allowed to work on the rebranding for two hours a day and the entire Friday. Moreover, we would meet every Friday between 10:00 and 10:30 to discuss and share the progress we had made.

Fourth, we would go on “Branding Week” with the entire team to finish all the unfinished tasks.

Inspiration sessions

The first two weeks were characterized by getting external inspiration. Every person was asked to do research for styling, designs, etc. and present these ideas to the team on the meeting on Friday morning. It was really fun to see how similar everyone’s taste was in some senses, yet so different in other.

Don’t design your own logo

The most difficult part in rebranding, is designing your logo. Our philosophy is to never design your own logo, because you are too emotionally attached. Therefore, you will never be 100% satisfied with the result. In addition, logo design is not our core business competence. We opted to outsource to this job to somebody in our vicinity who was more qualified to do the job.

We decided to hire the Dutch lettering king “Paul von Excite”. Together, in continuous dialogue, we developed our new logo. Paul will also write a blogpost about his side of the designing process.

The tools

Trello, Trello, and even more Trello. Trello is a free scrum board and is a very useful tool to keep an overview of your project management. We used Trello for Planning, Budget, Tasks, User Stories, and Notes. So pretty much everything.

In order to get an idea of this, here was the layout of the Trello board:

These are all tools that we used in the rebranding process:

• Sketch
• Sublime
• Redpen
• GitHub
• Vagrant
• CircleCI
• Amazon AWS
• Dribbble

Our Branding Week

To boost our productivity, we decided to go on a Branding trip to accomplish our ambitious goal of completely overhauling our business. We rented a cottage somewhere in the countryside and set to work.

Being removed from the hussel and bussel of the city proved to be just what we needed. The serenity helped us focus on the task at hand. To keep to the genre in which the cottage fit, lavish meals were cooked, good wines were consumed, and to relax, the nostalgic game of Risk was occasionally played. All in all, the days were long and the nights short, but our goals were achieved making the week more than worthwhile.

Until now, I haven’t gone into detail about the choices we made concerning the design process. In subsequent blogposts, our designers and developers will elaborate on this.

Thanks for reading! Visit our new website: http://brth.rs