Background
At the beginning of 2024 we had secured $20M in funding and we were ready to begin our journey to truly expanding our audience. In doing this we analyzed our current customer mix to determine how it had changed since the first phase of our rebrand. The average age had only gone from 58 to 56. We knew it was time to consider changing our name.
Expanding our audience was becoming a more urgent, with our new funding we were eager to prove to our investors we were worth investing in. The need for a new name really boiled down to a couple of factors:
Better expressing our purpose
We had always been a purpose driven business, but our old name "NewRetirement" was so tactical, so we’ve never fully expressed that.
Retirement is the culmination of every financial decision you make in your financial journey — if we wanted to help 100M people, we needed to expand beyond our current category (retirement) into financial planning and wellness so that we can reach people earlier in their journey.
Expanding our reach
We need to be in the places where financial decisions are getting made and appeal to people before they're even thinking about retirement.
Unless retired, retirement is something most people think of once a year when they review their 401K elections during open enrollment, or 2-5 years before they actually retire and need to ensure they can. We needed to increase our brand relevance, and more accurately reflect the functionality we'd built in the product for consumers, employers, and advisors.
Choosing our new name
Again, we engaged an agency to help us reposition and rename our brand. We worked with our agency to conduct thorough research into our prospective consumer and enterprise customers.
Ultimately, the name that was chosen was Boldin. And with this new name came a unique challenge... our existing brand was not very bold, but our updated brand positioning leaned into boldness. We began adjusting our brand aesthetic and voice to reflect the boldness of our new positiong.
Navigating change
At this point, our stakeholders were very sensitive to change, and wary that changes made to the brand would have a negative impact on the business. To mitigate these sensitivities, we were hyper intentional with each change we made from the original brand.
Additionally, each part of our brand true-up was tested thoroughly (logo, colors, typography, photography, messaging, etc) to ensure that any impact of the new brand would be a positive one.
Our updates
In the end, we updated our logo, brightened up our color palette, selected a new typeface, and tuned up both our messaging and photography.
Organizing the rollout
Unlike the first phase of our rebrand in 2021, we wanted to update every surface at the same time. This was a massive undertaking as we had hundreds of different locations we needed to develop assets for and make updates to. We started by creating a basic audit to start the conversation with stakeholders.
Myself and my program management partner realized quickly we'd need a robust solution to project manage the launch. To stay organized, we created a hub in Coda that allowed team members to add action items, update statuses, view the latest documents, and request assets.
In the end we identified almost 200 different action items required across 8 different teams and 40 different people in order to execute a successful launch.
The rollout started at 1am and by 3:22am it was successfully completed. Multiple team members shared that it went "way smoother than expected," which I'd like to believe is a testament to good planning and great teamwork.
