Background
When I started at NewRetirement (now Boldin) if you had asked 5 different people at the company to describe the company, you would have gotten 5 vastly different responses. The company had no clear identity. One of my mandates when I was hired was to give it one.
Discovery
Before rebranding, we had a couple of bigger directional questions to answer:
Do we keep our name? We knew having a name with the word retirement in it would be limiting as we tried to go after broader audiences, but we were also a Seed stage company with limited funding and a rename would be much more expensive.
Which audience were we going after? We had an audience of 55+ men who really enjoyed retirement planning, but that population was limited. We knew we needed to expand, but how?
After some initial workshops with the founders to identify the scope and direction of the rebrand, I engaged an agency (Ruca) to help support us in developing a brand strategy and identity.
We opted to keep our name for now, but briefed the agency that our new identity needed to be flexible enough to swap in a new name in the future. We also opted to create a brand that could be inclusive for folks as young as 35, but retaining our focus on those who are near retirement.
Through some testing and iteration the agency delivered our brand identity and strategy.
Making economical choices as a small company
Because we were a small, seed funded company at the time, we didn’t have a lot of money to throw at buying new typefaces, creating a library of custom brand photography, and we only had one designer at the time to implement all of this (me). This meant I had to make sure that our agency partners were optimizing for where we were as a company today, while building a brand that could flex for the type of growth we wanted to see in the future.
Applying the new brand
Realizing the impact
We had an archaic WordPress marketing website, a product that was design by engineers, and an assortment of generic decks. We prioritized applying the new identity to marketing materials first with product updates (including a properly branded design system) following that.
A final word
As a result of our new brand identity and strategy, everyone at our company was finally describing it the same way. It made gaining alignment much easier, and gave us a palette of words from which we could all play with in communications.
A couple years later, we renamed the company to better match our more inclusive positioning.