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. I felt a real connection to the people and the purpose of the organization. However, the way we presented ourselves as a company didn’t feel like the collective Spry I’d come to know. That disconnect made one thing clear: we needed a company rebrand strategy rooted in who we truly are.

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 who felt we could represent our company in a more accurate, appealing way. I heard many ideas on how to improve our perception in the 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 I was new. I did not want to shake things up too much. Then, as it always does, came change. Our leadership grew, and I took charge of the Design Team. As time passed, my sense of ownership of our brand had deepened. With the full support of our senior leadership, our team officially began exploring a visual brand identity update.

Awesome! The Design Team finally had the chance to refresh our identity. 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. She held a stake in the brand 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 did exactly what we designed ourselves 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 for the company rebrand strategy considered six key aspects of our brand. First, we looked at accessibility, reproduction challenges, design constraints, longevity, perception issues, and brand-voice alignment. We then shared our findings from that effort with stakeholders in our formal findings report. This resulted in us holding a mirror up to ourselves to see whom we’d become. While we aimed for impartiality, we recognized that people experience a brand subjectively. To account for this, we encouraged every stakeholder to share their perspective on the brand openly and without fear of judgement.

To establish the clear understanding and strong collaboration among stakeholders necessary for a successful company 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 you do it 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 developed the timeline and budget to execute our big idea. 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 the company rebrand strategy, 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.

This article was originally written by Heath Harris.