Branding our Startup
Some of the steps we took to build a brand that fit our business and met our target demographic.
Branding is tough—rebranding is just, if not more. Recently, we went through it, and I can tell you it’s more than just picking a catchy name. There can be different motivators as to why the change. We chose to rebrand because our previous name—Listed Motors—no longer reflected our mission and we were constantly competing with real estate listings, not to mention we were buried within the Google mountain.
Name
Imagine being in a room filled with 30 executives and entrepreneurs all working together to solve one problem. Well that’s what we did thanks to our family at ATB X. The problem we all tackled? Our name. Among our list of names was Karmata, NoLemono, and Honestii. All great names, but the one that really spoke to us was CarBerri. We immediately loved the ring to it, not to mention the berry awesome puns that could be used!
Tip: Check the domain availability along with social media accounts. Namechk is able to do this all at once.
Colour
Although colours may seem like a small task, they impact your brand immensely. It sets the mood for your customers, influences user experience, and develops consistency. We knew we wanted to be playful, so we experimented with various hues of green, red, and orange. A big shift from our previous mundane blue. We worked alongside our designer and eventually reached a colour we all loved—Carmine Pink.
Tip: Coolors is a great resource to help get you started.
Values
Who are we? That was the golden question. Luckily, we had some assistance from the Brand Deck. We all sat down and came up with our three key characteristics: effortless, sincere, and welcoming. These three factors have been guiding our customer interactions, behaviours, and tone, but recognizing them and putting them in stone will guarantee we practice them more regularly.
Tagline
We wanted to describe what we do while also fostering curiosity, so we put our heads together again, asked some friends, and arrived at “Car buying and selling made sweeter.”
Interested in how we make car buying and selling sweeter? Well, let me shamelessly plug our website. (Please note the website is still undergoing a makeover!)
Tip: I would recommend starting off with a value proposition canvas. It helps to outline exactly what pains you solve and what gains you create.
Logo
Design our logo was an entire process on its own. We started off by spending countless hours drawing berries, circles, and leaves until we had no more space. This was followed by changing colours and fonts. Then re-doing that a hundred times. The amount of iterations were countless. On what seemed to be the millionth version, I knew we had it. It was simple, creative, and a little abstract. It was CarBerri.
Tip: I recommend sitting down with a designer and spending a little money on this. After all, you will be seeing it everywhere.
Reflection
We’ve only finished a few factors of what it takes to completely rebrand our startup because there’s still plenty more, such as typography, illustration style, grid sizing, and so on. We’re learning more about our business through this experience everyday.
As I mentioned before, we’re currently working on redeveloping our website, so stay tuned for its launch in July 2017!
In the mean time, drop by our current website to let us help you sell a car or buy your next car completely online.
