Making the case for our own rebrand

It’s true. I did not love our brand when I first joined Spry Digital four years ago. While I felt a real connection to the people and the purpose of the organization, the way we presented ourselves as a company didn’t feel like the collective Spry I’d come to know.

The company’s voice and visual identity had become out of sync. The market, our audience, and our collective “self” had changed over time. As a visual designer, I had my own design-centric perspective about the way we showed up. I wasn’t the only one in the company who felt we could represent our company in a more accurate, appealing way. Across teams, I heard anecdotes and ideas regarding ways to improve how we’re perceived in the market and wider community.

When the opportunity presented itself, I would mention the possibility of updating our brand, but I didn’t push the subject. We had other priorities, and as a new member of the team, I did not want to shake things up too much. Then, as it always does, came change. Our leadership grew, I was put in charge of our Design Team, and enough time had gone by that my sense of ownership of our brand had grown. Backed by senior company leadership, our team was given the go-ahead to start officially considering a visual brand identity update.

Awesome! The Design Team was finally getting what it had been asking for – the chance to refresh the identity of our organization. But getting to that point was the easy part. The next step was to make the case for the need for such a major undertaking to Spry’s co-founder, Sheila Burkett. The existing brand was something she had a stake in since the beginning. Changing it would be a big deal, not only logistically, but emotionally. Being good listeners and empathetic collaborators was key to gaining her trust. She needed to know that re-thinking our identity did not mean throwing away the years of brand equity she and many others had worked to build. It meant we were doing exactly what we were designed to do: grow.

We needed consensus among and the full backing of our group of leaders. Without it, the process could become delayed or derailed by internal friction, and the final product wouldn’t be the best possible reflection of who we truly are.

Just as we would for one of our clients, we started with research to objectively understand the situation. Our evaluation considered six key aspects of our brand. We looked at accessibility, reproduction challenges, design constraints, longevity, perception issues, and brand-voice alignment. What we learned through that effort was shared with stakeholders via a findings report. We were holding a mirror up to ourselves and taking a good, close look at whom we’d grown to become. While we tried to be impartial, a company’s brand is experienced subjectively, with each viewer having their individual interpretations. We needed to let each stakeholder share how they felt about our brand without the fear of judgment.

To establish the clear understanding and strong collaboration among stakeholders necessary for a successful rebrand, we created ways to engage collectively. We needed to listen to the owners of the brand, and they needed to feel heard. Our job was to provide a platform for everyone’s questions, concerns, ideas, and opinions that facilitated mutual understanding. Using Figma’s FigJam whiteboards gave us a way to collect the feedback essential to shaping rough concepts into a polished identity. Rebranding is never easy, especially when it is being done for your own organization. Patience and empathy informed both the process and the final product.

Beyond the opinions and aesthetics, there were other tangible considerations. To better inform our stakeholders’ decision-making, our team assessed what it would take to implement a new brand across every company touchpoint. We created the potential timeline and budget required for our big idea to be executed. After a few (sometimes emotional) meetings, we achieved alignment on the need for change, receiving unanimous approval to revise Spry’s 14-year-old brand.

With our listening, research, and validation resulting in a green light to start revising the brand, the next step was to actually design it. In my next post, I’ll share the process our Design Team followed to take our brand from old to new. We’ll take a look at the concepting, sketching, designing, refining, and implementation it took to evolve Spry’s identity into what you see today.