When I first started at Shippo, there was an acute disconnect between the company's visual identity and who they were as a company.
This is a peek behind the curtain of how we started to transform the company's look and feel.
I started by looking at what exists in the Shippo brand ecosystem. I found that although legacy teams have created brand guides in the past, it wasn't used consistently.
This made Shippo show up unprofessionally to our customers. Consistency communicated reliability and that was an important trademark to who Shippo is as a company.
Brand Guide (Before)
Brand Audit (Before)
BUSINESS NEED:
As Shippo matures, the brand must grow with it. No longer a small start-up, Shippo wants to be perceived as a modern and professional software company.
As Shippo matures, the brand must grow with it. No longer a small start-up, Shippo wants to be perceived as a modern and professional software company.
BRANDING CHALLENGE:
Create a brand that reflects Shippo's ethos and founder vision.
But how do we get there?
During my onboarding, I had the opportunity to talk to many cross-functional leaders across Shippo. This helped me gauge where Shippo is as a company as well as where they want to go. These series of conversations then later informed how I defined Shippo's Brand Attributes.
Understand founder vision
Next, I wanted to hear from our two founders, Laura and Simon.
I wanted to understand why they started the company and where they see it going.
I wanted to understand why they started the company and where they see it going.
Inclusive considerations
To me, it was important to create a brand that took into account a holistic sense of who Shippo was. So, I didn't just stop at just our founders. I asked Shippo's leadership, and employees, and scoured through our customer's Net Promoter Score (NPS) to get a sense of who Shippo is. Together, all these conversations allowed me to formulate a synthesis and brand attribute proposal.
Visual hypothesis
With the defined Brand Attributes, I created a series of visual hypotheses that lean into different axes of the 5 attributes. Each of them captured a different essence we can take the Shippo brand language.
Refinement
Of course, no design process would be complete without refinement. Taking what I heard from our founders, I took the essence of the hypothesis and shaped them closer to who Shippo as a company wants to be.
Our Visual Direction
In the refinement phase, the founders and I landed on Concept A because of its product-centric elements, and easy-to-understand graphics. From here, we would use this visual direction as the foundation for building Shippo's new brand identity.
We would continue to polish and refine this hypothesis into a formalized brand.
This brand exercise is just the beginning of defining the new visual direction of Shippo's brand. We arrived at a refined visual hypothesis at the end of November 2023.
To see more, check out Creating Shippo's Company Values.
To see more, check out Creating Shippo's Company Values.
Sponsors:
Role: Brand Design Lead
Type: Brand Redesign
Status: Refinement complete on November 2023
