Go Ahead, Get All Up In Our Business.
It’s a classic case of the cobbler’s son having no shoes. We preach branding, messaging, and strategy, but we let our own website fall behind the times. Sure, it was beautiful (and got compliments left and right), but we’ve grown a lot since we first put that site up, and it was beyond time for an update that would reflect everything we’re doing — and becoming.
But nobody knows better than we do that building an effective website doesn’t start with thinking about a website. We didn’t start with design or copy or even a wireframe. Before we could do any of that, we needed to be clear about who we are and what we do.
Fortunately, we know our way around brand strategy, so we started with the cornerstones: mission, vision, and values. Our mission and vision just needed some tweaking, but half of our team wasn’t around when we developed our first set of values, so we knew we needed to do some deeper work to define what we’re doing, who we’re doing it for, and why we show up every day.
We sat down as a team. We’re small enough that each of us has a huge influence on our culture, so it was vital to hear from everyone. Following the Great Mondays quick-start exercise, we began with the behaviors we already embody that we wanted to codify into values. This ended up being a really special team-building time as we all shared what we admire about each other, and it let us walk away with a set of five values that define us to a T.
From there, we built out a few more strategy elements, and then it was time to put pen to paper. We roped in our favorite copywriter, Jessie Congleton, to spruce things up and make everything crystal clear. Bringing in Jessie’s fresh eyes helped us hone in on our messaging and capture our brand voice right on the money.
Next up: the visuals! We incorporated some new elements for our brand identity and tweaked everything until it was juuuuust right. Then we roped in the whole team to revamp our marketing strategy, ensuring that we were hearing from all of our voices as we got ready to share our new perspective.
The result? We feel more confident than ever that we’re putting our best foot forward and sharing what we’re passionate about!
At the end of the day, we don’t just want to look cool and put together just for the sake of it — we want to be speaking to our clients in the clearest way possible and representing our community well. We want to speak proudly about our team, our work, and our collective values and draw our community into the conversation in a meaningful way.
As our clients know well, it’s often hard to focus on developing your own business amidst your daily tasks, but building a strong foundation before going out into the world is crucial to building a brand like nobody’s business.
Not only are we proud of this brand refresh for ourselves, but we’re proud of the process it took to get us here. We were able to take steps in our clients' shoes and reflect at each milestone to ensure we’d end up with strategic, visual, and functional clarity.
If you need a fresh perspective on your brand, we gotcha. After all, we’ve been in your shoes.