Unknown Speaker  0:00  
The best way to understand the product is to use the product. The best way to talk about the product is just to show the product as it is used, you know? So if we're talking about loom let's just show looms, you know, if we're talking about how it allows you to be authentic and expressive, let's just show that happening. You know, there's no like PR strategy or can a marketing campaign that can really do that better than just showing by the raw material, you know?

Blake Howard  0:41  
Hey, everyone, welcome to a change of brand, a show featuring behind the scenes stories of rebrand glory, drama, or disaster. I'm your host, Blake Howard. Today's story features an up and coming tech brand that you might not have heard of. I first became aware of Luma in early March 2020, just before the COVID 19 pandemic really hit the US. I was traveling to San Francisco for work and needed to review some projects while I was on the road. I personally detest long winded time consuming emails or yellow comment boxes dropped into a PDF. It just feels so inefficient, compared to in person reviews especially. And it really requires clear articulation of words and thoughts in typed format, which is not my strong suit. There's so much room for my team to misunderstand my comments or my tone. And that essentially is the problem that loom solves. It's a screen sharing video service that records whatever's on your screen with a little bubble that pops up to show your own cam as you talk, then you just send that cloud based video to whomever needs to see it. And they can instantly watch it drop in comment or even use emojis to respond throughout the video. For remote creative teams. This is kind of a game changer. And back in early 2020. Honestly, I thought it was a novelty product. I thought oh, this is cool. I'll use it when I'm traveling. But I never fathom it becoming a major part of my workflow during the COVID era. So needless to say, I am a fan of today's brand in a little bias. But also I wanted to do an episode on a smaller startup to dig into the nuances of change on a different scale. And in some ways, it's easier with less hierarchy to approve big decisions or less complicated timelines. And in other ways it can be more challenging. With a smaller team often comes a more passionate and connected group with loads of opinions. I think smaller teams are more protective and personally invested in the brand that represents them much more than some large enterprise. This change of brand was also done in house. So I wondered how they managed the feedback process from their co workers. It's sort of like that saying a profit isn't welcome in their own town. outside agencies appear smarter, more creative and more expert, not because they are but because they're strangers. You don't see their everyday flaws like you would with a day to day coworker. So I have two key questions today. How would the brand team behind the loom rebrand? manage this process deal with a potential swarm of feedback? And how would they get their ideas to stick? To get more on the backstory of this tech startup and what led up to the loom rebrand. Let's go to brand strategist Sarah Gail Hughes, for our brief in.

Unknown Speaker  3:34  
Move empowers users to bring their work to life through communication, wherever you're located. It's a tool a piece of technology that is built for the reality of work today. Before I jump into the history of the brand, I think it's important for me to actually explain what Luma is in case you've never used it. So loom is a video messaging tool, often used within teams or whole enterprises that lets you send quick or long clips of yourself. So you can talk through a problem provide feedback, explain your thinking, or just narrate a screen share. Okay, so when it comes to the story of limit all starts with three guys, Joe Thomas Shahid Khan and Vinay hiremath. They founded Lim just about five years ago. They were really good friends and just had this desire to start a company. And so one Sunday, they hopped on a video call and started whiteboarding, a bunch of ideas for what they could create. They knew whatever their product would be, it would revolve around video, see, video communication had become this larger consumer trend, and it was blowing up back in the mid 2010s. So at first, their product was a video feedback tool for product teams. It was just a Chrome extension at this point, kind of like a survey for product users in the form of a video. It was called Open test. And their customers loved the user experience of the video tools so much that they just wanted to use it without the survey feature. And so one of the founders built the technology necessary to make this new product work. They officially launched Open Beta In June of 2016 Sounds really simple. But the streaming transcoding and storage technology that make this product work is really valuable. loom even holds the patent for it. So at first they were known as open bid, but around seven months later, they renamed to loom. This new name was really driven by the desire for mission alignment. And the name concept was inspired by that. At this point, they had done some research, they understood their audience a little more, and they realized that they had the ability to solve a truly felt problem for remote teams, efficient and effective communication. Like most startup stories, looms, founders hold a strong conviction around their product, and its potential for impact. They believe that people's use of video is increasing, and that the world of work is also changing. And more and more people are expected to work together in different cities, time zones, offices, and less and less are they meeting face to face. That's become even more true in the past year. So as a result, they believe the world needs more sophisticated ways of working with each other. And they think that loom is the solution to that problem. In the past four years, they've worked hard to raise capital to build their company, and have been really successful and attracting investors who can help them grow. Fun fact, Ashton Kutcher is one of their investors, and also a huge fan and user of the product himself. As loom continued to grow. They realize their brand didn't fully express their vision value and differentiation. They really wanted a complete brand system that captured who they were. They wanted the character of their company and their vision for impact to be clear, and they wanted a brand that felt really relevant to their users. So they knew it was time for a change of brand.

Blake Howard  6:45  
If I've learned one thing during my career, it's that if Kelso from the 70 show an angel face from Fight Club or backing a startup, then let me tell you, I am in in addition to their endorsement, I think this is a pretty interesting idea. If you think about it, email and all types of communications are pretty inefficient. voice or video messaging is the next best thing to being in person. In my opinion. This product also removes an interesting scheduling fiasco that many of us face, instead of looking for a 30 minute or 60 minute time block on a calendar for three to four people to then collaborate and review a presentation or a deck and to get feedback. This allows each individual person to watch the video on their own timeline. Just for the record loom did not sponsor today's episode. Maybe they should have, but I am just a genuine fanboy. The loom rebrand was announced in shared in October of 2020. And the way they shared it really caught my attention, and we'll get to that in a little bit. Previously, the loom brand was pretty basic. The primary symbol is a circular spiral shape with an opening camera aperture kind of a thing going on with a salmon or faded red color that sits next to a pretty basic dark gray geometric Wordmark. Besides that, there wasn't really much going on to share about for the before. As a user of the product. I ironically, didn't really even pay much attention to the visual verbal system. Beyond the logo. I just saw that little symbol in my app bar when I needed to make a loom. The refresh led by the internal brand team at loom started with better defining the brand's promise in message to the marketplace. Then it refreshed the logo and visual identity system, the symbol evolved into a sunlight shape, with a center circle and 12 radiating lines. It also brought in a unique lavender color to the brand and ditched that old faded red salmon. They refreshed all of the color palette, they have really top notch photo styling, and more to the system that you should check out for yourself, so be sure to go to a change of brand.com. Just click on the loom episode and scroll to see the breakdown. I first came across the refresh when Stuart Scott current looms, Senior Director of Brand shared the process on Twitter through a series of loom videos from the brand team.

Unknown Speaker  9:05  
Hello, my name is Brooks. I'm a brand strategist on the design team at loom. And here to talk to you about some brand strategy stuff.

Unknown Speaker  9:14  
Hey, everybody, I'm Tim, I work on the brand team here at Loon I wanted to walk through a little bit about how we approached photo and video on loom as part of our brand elements at launch.

Unknown Speaker  9:22  
Hello everyone. My name is Ali and I'm the producer on the brand team at loom. I've been able to work across so many different projects going on with this new rebrand but one of my favorite ones was the photoshoot that we were able to do at the beginning of September. There.

Unknown Speaker  9:36  
I'm Maurice a product designer at loom. I along with my design colleagues here at loom and responsible for the rebranded

Blake Howard  9:44  
I had a chance to connect with Stuart and to get his take on the project. And one very important note before we get started, Stuart is Scottish.

Unknown Speaker  9:53  
I was born in just to say Glasgow, Scotland. I actually studied industrial design and which was called product design that our team, which product design means something different now. And when I graduated, I ended up moving into graphic design.

Blake Howard  10:10  
He worked at Nike for almost 10 years designing soccer uniforms just out of school. And if you remember the US Men's National Team primary kit and the 2010 World Cup with a diagonal sash, yeah, that was his design. He eventually made his way to Coca Cola in Atlanta, Georgia, which is where we first met and became friends. And he spent some time at CNN before heading to the west coast, where he led the intercom brand team for a few years, worked at a digital agency called instrument and eventually landed a job with the San Francisco based video messaging startup called loom. And like most gigs, his personal connections really helped him get the job.

Unknown Speaker  10:47  
So the head of design at loom is a guy called Joshua Goldenberg. He was the product design leader at Slack. So I got to know him through the work that he was doing there. And we talked about working together and didn't quite work out. And then we kind of went our separate ways. He moved from San Francisco to Grass Valley, California, I moved up here to Portland, and we eventually connected. And unbeknown to me, he had moved to loom. And I hadn't used the product, it wasn't a product that was super familiar to me, where he wanted to ask me some questions about brand in general. And he was like, I'm the head of design, but I really could use somebody just to give the brand stuff to, and I was I was I was really interested in, like, let me give the product that we're all and see what it's all about. And I used it and I was like, wow, this is amazing. Like, this has real potential applications for making things a lot easier, and a whole bunch of different ways. And that was even before the pandemic kicked off, you know, so since then, it's only become more valuable to us. But that was when I first got to know, Joshua, and thankful we got to work on it together, when we hadn't quite managed to make it happen. It's like, I was excited about reenergizing, the brand, they're a small, early stage company, I think they were around 40 or so people when I started there, and they had like a brand and near quartz, but it wasn't really fully formed. And so it was a real good chance to put some early building blocks in the early framework around that, do that with your issuer, and then kind of work with the product and really try and build that to be the thing that it has the potential to be. So it was a really awesome opportunity. For me, it was like a fairly blank canvas, which is kind of like a dream opportunity, I guess. And just like a really strong product, it was already like a compelling piece of software. So it felt like a really great opportunity to do something interesting.

Blake Howard  12:41  
Yeah, that's cool. So was the rebrand something that was on the table from the get go? Like were you brought in to re envision it? Or did that sort of come after you are in the role and you started to have different feelings or thoughts about the way you were kind of going to market with the product,

Unknown Speaker  12:57  
it was definitely on the table, it was definitely acknowledged that way or the brand that they had was functional enough, it wasn't necessarily the thing that was going to take them through the next like 234 or five years. So there was definitely an acknowledgment that we were going to need to do some kind of rebranding exercise, when exactly that may be in what format that would take was kind of open to debate, it was a known quantity going and that was going to be something that we would tackle fairly early on.

Blake Howard  13:27  
What were some of the goals of the rebrand. You said it was a pretty functional brand system at the time or maybe really limited or maybe just had some TBD, not fully fleshed out what were some of the goals going into a rebrand? What did you want to accomplish?

Unknown Speaker  13:40  
The biggest thing for us was really just to have like a visual identity system and an identity system that's expressed in words as to like what the true value of the product is, there was some strategic components that were missing, we had like a really strong mission and vision statement. And we had a really strong product. But we didn't have anything in the middle that really could have articulated like how that vision statement translated to the benefit that you as a user could get just day to day. So that was our work on what we would call a brand promise. And that was like a strategic underpinning that was kind of missing. The Foundation and the framework that we built the visual design system and the brand voice and tone on top of so those were the biggest things that we needed to do. The overarching goal was really just to build a brand which we felt would allow us to scale in the way that we felt the company could scale. We wanted it to be a little bit more grown up a little bit more serious and, you know, present ourselves as a company that's going to be around for a while. You know, the brand that we had was just super limited. We had a logo with a few colors. We'd pick the typeface and that was essential. Yeah, there wasn't really any kind of tuna. Voice guidelines, there weren't really any foundational underpinnings to our visual system, there was just kind of bits and pieces stuck together, which worked great. But it wasn't particularly scalable.

Blake Howard  15:11  
I think it's worth mentioning the competitive landscape for loom. Now the product is very unique. There's nothing quite like it except maybe a solo zoom, selfie hack sort of thing. But could you imagine being a startup in a market where your competitors are zoom, Slack, Google, or Apple?

Unknown Speaker  15:31  
Honestly, like, we really made a conscious decision not to focus too much on, I think, like, we felt very strongly that we already had our own sense of identity, we just hadn't necessarily expressed that to the world. Yeah, you know, we have a really strong mission, we have like a really strong set of like internal values, we just hadn't vocalized those. And so I think that was what we focused on is still a new space, there's still a lot of Greenfield opportunity. You know, I don't think there's anybody really necessarily that we would look at and see, wow, they really nailed that, you know, so I think like, we want to, to just like follow our own path, try and do something new and interesting and compelling, and the worked for us. And we weren't too worried about what other folks were doing as thoroughly.

Blake Howard  16:23  
I'm curious to jump into maybe some of the strategic underpinning that you talked about? Could you share some of that process and how your team went about defining on a granular level more of the strategy for loom?

Unknown Speaker  16:36  
Yeah, that was the very first part, this was going back to January 2020. So we traveled to San Francisco when people could still travel. And we did like two or three days worth of workshops in the loom office that they have there. Half of our company is based in SF in the office and the other half is remote around the world. And we just spent a bunch of time doing some strategy sprints, some design sprints, interview, and key people at the company, whether they're C suite executives, or folks from the sales team, that's always a really critical input in terms of like, when they talk to prospects, you know, how do they articulate what loom is and the value that it can deliver our customer service team, we spent a lot of time going pretty deep on that, and just kind of like starting to put a few words together on how loom feels to use like how it feels to be able to communicate in an easy and authentic and expressive way, and then just start to kind of like, feel our way initially as to like what some kind of descriptive words to that may be. And that was kind of the very, very, very starting point of that. And pretty quickly, once we finished those sessions, we started to work on a more robust brand strategy, which was a brand promise, and we kicked a few things around, but we landed on the idea of Bloom has been the thing that brings your work to life, like this is the thing where there's a lot of potential energy that exists within the work that you do on your screen. But it's only when you introduce yourself and your face and your words and your gestures that you really can unlock the stories and the insights that can live within that work is kind of an interesting problem, we realize that we do all of our work on your screen. And we've been sharing our screen for a long, long time, we've just had to kind of work through various different hacks have been able to do that, whether that's export a PDF, and then email it to someone with a talk track tapes out in the email. And then it's like, see my comments and read. You know, there's this whole kind of workflow that we've tried to kind of hack together around, really was just sharing your screen. And so with loom, obviously, you're able to do that in video, and then have you in your own words and been able to bring your own emotions and expressions to and that was really the key and say, for us, it was really about bringing your work to life. And that was the kind of strategic unlock, I think, for us that we then took and started to build out into a visual system.

Blake Howard  19:07  
Okay, so the brand team has a central idea and brand promise of bringing your work to life. But I was curious, how would they bring that sort of intangible idea to life visually, or verbally?

Unknown Speaker  19:20  
That was the one part in the process where we kind of messed around. We were messing around for a couple of weeks trying various different things like what feels right, how do we do that? It was tricky. The breakthrough that we made was, how do you take this kind of fairly nebulous, visual idea about bringing your work to life, you can understand how that feels. But what does it actually look like? We ended up just going back to something really, really simple, which was if we're talking about sharing your screen, like what does it actually look like to share your screen in its simplest simplest form, and so we broke down the identity of a loom to see simplest form is simply geometry, which is essentially a block, which is your screen. And then the circle, which is the camera that goes on top, and is the two things that work together, which makes a loom and that concept, we started calling the bubble, which is the cam bubble and the block, which is your work. And it's the idea that the magic happens. You know, like I said, when you introduce the bubble to the block, that's when things become interesting. And that's where the energy and the creative spark comes from. And so literally having those two shapes was kind of like the very early Genesis of what would become a visual design system. There's a little bit of a bridge to get over, which is, hey, we have this kind of idea for the foundation of a system is the bubble in the block, it's about potential energy versus kinetic energy. And what happens when those two things come together, it's about the brand promise, which is bringing your work to life, like, all makes sense, you know, but it's like, there's a jump that you have to make from that to something that actually starts to feel like a billboard, or a website, or a TV spot, or whatever it may be. So we just started to take that geometry and started to play around with it and started to make it move and try to literally bring it to life a little bit. And I think like, that's the way that we were first able to actually articulate what we were talking about purely in visual form, we had a couple of little quick prototype animations that we did have the bubble moving through different colored blocks. And as it moved over a new block, who would activate it, and it would bring that to life, who would change the color, it would change the scale, there would be something else. And that was kind of like the first unlock in terms of presenting that to other folks at the company, which is like, Yeah, this is actually something that could

Blake Howard  21:52  
work was there a moment where the founder saw the new logo for the first time or saw sort of the vision casting of what the new loom could be? Was there a moment kind of like that, where you had to present it or others had to present it,

Unknown Speaker  22:04  
there was definitely moments where we presented work, we had a figma file with like 75 pages and 5000 different options on each, we were all over the map, there was a couple of different things, there was the visual system piece, and then there was the logo, which are obviously connected, but somewhat separate. I do remember one little corner of figma artboards, where we started messing around with this idea of a game of Tetris, you know, like it was like, it felt like one of those games where you slide the squares into the one that's open, and you try and kind of recreate the picture, that kind of fell a little bit like that. And it was these sliding blocks that we're scaling up and down. And I think that was the first time where we were like, oh, yeah, this actually feels like there could be something there. Logo ways we were kind of all over the place for a while, I think we took a couple weeks just to go as wide as we possibly could and just get as many ideas generated as we could everyone on the team was chipping in ideas. And I think we landed on maybe like four or five of them as like a first pass. Like conceptually, this is what these could be. The final one was not in there that actually came later, based on feedback that we got on the first round of logo options. And as we started to tweak laws, the one that we have now started to come to life. So it's kind of interesting that the one option that we ended up with was not in like the first presentation to the CEO and some of the other folks that kind of came a little bit later, we had one that we really loved and it was kind of like an archway, so it had some geometry. It was literally a block and a bubble just stuck together. But it felt like a window and it felt like a view to like a different world. But the CEO said it looked like a toenail. And so that kind of killed it dead. Like as soon as suddenly he described the logo is looking like a toenail. You're like okay, that's done.

Blake Howard  24:01  
You know, anytime someone names it, it's done. It's done. The amount of over analyzation subjectivity inkblot test that goes into a moment like that is unbelievable. It's funny because consumers never overanalyze it as much as the internal team does when they're looking at you know, a projector screen or whatever.

Unknown Speaker  24:21  
100% Yeah.

Blake Howard  24:25  
Okay, when we come back from the break, we learn more about the final direction for the new loom brand identity, and how Stewart's ingenious idea kept the company in the loop the entire rebrand process, all that more after the break.

Hey, everyone, I want to take a quick minute and give a hat tip to match tickets where I work in our producing partner for this show. We specialize in helping growing brands find their identity and take it to the next level. If you need help clarifying your message or standing out in the market, be sure to visit us at matched iq.com. That's ma tch sdic.com. And also, we are hiring for a few positions. If you're an experienced messaging director, and you really like the brand strategy and copywriting side of branding, then be sure to check out this open position, it might be right up your alley also wanted to say thanks to everyone who has listened and enjoyed this show. So far, we are so close to wrapping up season one with just two more episodes left. But I'm already thinking ahead about season two. So if there's a brand story that you want to hear more about, send us a DM on Instagram and let us know. And as always telling a fellow brand nerd or two about this show, or leaving a review is a great way to help us spread the word. If you do leave a review, you'll have a chance to win some sweet prizes, be sure to hang on at the end of today's episode to hear this week's winner. Okay, back to the show. Stuart and the loom brand team are working their way through an updated visual and verbal identity. Based on their bring your work to life mantra, they established more in the strategic phase of the project. They've presented a few options and ideas and had some various opinions on which way to head including one new symbol that felt a wee bit like a toenail. I was curious how they were filtering through some of these subjective preferences, and how they kept the project moving forward.

Unknown Speaker  26:30  
I mean, we did have a filter that we were passing this stuff through, which was you know, we were thinking about the work of drams and brown and how that was just like very simple and very functional. And color really played a key role in terms of denoting functionality. But there was also like a real kind of technical finesse behind that. And so we were inspired by a lot of that work in terms of retaining the essence of the bubble in the block and how that was very simple in terms of his geometry, it's easy to kind of get carried away and start introducing complexity as you continue to build the system. But we were always trying to edit it as much as possible. And I think that was one of the things that we ran into, which was like, a lot of the options were so simple, we were looking at them and be like, that can be the logo cannot it should be more complicated, you know, and a lot of times we're like, Well, no, maybe it can just be really, really simple. And there's still be expressive and reflect what we are and who we are as a company. But there's always this kind of doubt that sometimes creeps in which is like, I feel like I need to work harder to justify what I'm doing here by like, bring some flourishes and or something. You know, one of the challenges

Blake Howard  27:43  
with wanting to keep something really simple in terms of logo design, is that if you are successful in that minimalism, it will undoubtedly resemble something else out there, there is only so much you can do with circles and rectangles. And there really is nothing new graphically under the sun,

Unknown Speaker  28:01  
we made a conscious decision that we wanted it to be memorable, but not necessarily unique. Because I think like trying to do something unique would ultimately push us to make decisions based on its proximity to something else, rather than just focusing on is this the right thing to do for the mark for the company. And so I think we knew that, by doing something really simple, there are going to be other things that look like it. Like, that's just how it's going to be. But we're probably okay with that. You know, like we're okay with the fact that we've come up with this on our own. It says what we want it to see, it feels how we want it to feel and it's memorable for us. But it's very, very hard to come up with like a truly unique mark, that doesn't start to complicate or dilute some of the really strong messages that you're trying to imbue in the mark. You know,

Blake Howard  28:57  
I want to hear a little bit more about the final refresh. And what was special about it for you, you know, what made you feel like it was the right direction.

Unknown Speaker  29:06  
I think it really felt like, whoa, loom was to us. It was simple. It was expressive. It was flexible. You know, I think we knew that this was going to be a system that we can add to overtime and was going to have some flexibility to it. We could dial the colors up or down. We can have more fun with it, we can pull it back. I think by virtue of it being so simple. It leaves a lot of room. There were a lot of containers that you can put different things into. So you can bring in animation, you can bring in interactive elements. We talked a little bit about the magic of the space in between our screens. We started having some fun with actually trying to visualize those and the idea that the can bubble has some physicality to it and they can influence the things around you know, whether it's like magnetism or gravity. You know, can you actually visualize those things? The same way that if you have a magnet where you can see magnetic fields with iron filings, we started to think about ways that we could visualize the kinetic energy that the bubble brings to your presentations. But that being said, the foundational principles were still very, very simple and very solid, and can a very true A Yes. So I think like, that's when we really feel like we had something that was going to work for us. And the logo mark was feeling really good, because that was literally a bubble and a bunch of blocks. So you know, like, everything started ticking to work with each other. And then it was a case of like, okay, what are we going to do with it. So the first thing was to build a new website, do some voice and tone work, and then actually start to use it, start to play with it, see where it may go, I think like, the unlock that we had was, you know what, like, everything that we talk about is about you, we're not speaking to you directly as the creator, you know, as the creative agent, that how you express yourself, as you talk about your work, it was more about the product and the abstract, or the experience and the abstract. And we wanted to bring the focus back on to the person that we are speaking to directly like it was bring your work to life. We toyed a little bit with that early on, is it bring work to life? Or is it bring your work to life and we liked like, how direct and how personal a message that was? And we came back to that as we were working through logo options. And we were thinking, Okay, well, what is what would it look like to actually focus on you, the user and put you at the center with your creative energy can read in from that, that was kind of when we flipped the concept a little bit back to you yourself and speaking directly to the person who's using the product and making videos. So you know, we had an idea that the bubble was going to be at the center and then it was a case of playing with how do we show how you express yourself, you know is that with a gradient is it with other shapes around is it with like two bubbles talking to each other, there was a whole bunch of options in there. Before we landed on the same one,

Blake Howard  32:02  
I want to jump down to color colors a big part of any identity. And you all had a shift here you went from a little bit of a faded light red to more of a lavender light purple, can you talk us through the rationale and the thinking in that color shift,

Unknown Speaker  32:17  
the red was primarily there, because it was the color of recording, you know, like red is for record. And so there was a connection to the functionality of what you do when you use the product, you'd start a recording, that's the primary action you take. So what we did was we stuck with that color, we thought, okay, red is going to be or a version of that red is going to be at the center. And then we're going to build out from there, we'll have kind of darker, slightly more neutral tones on one side, brighter, more expressive tones on the other. And then the red is in the middle. And that's what everything is centered around, everything was built out. From that read, we made a feel a little bit more earthy, a little bit more textured, a little bit closer to like a normal read that you would see in a record button. The read that we had before we actually refer to salmon, there was a little bit more pinky. So we can brought it to like a more recognizable like record read. And everything can win from there to like a dark blue on one end to like a bright yellow and the other. And the red is kind of somewhere in the middle.

Blake Howard  33:28  
The mark right now is a light lavender, right? That's the primary representation was their conversation of like, okay, this product is really wise and imaginative and unique. So let's go towards like this purple, was there an emotional connotation? Or was it just like, Man that lavender feels good,

Unknown Speaker  33:44  
it was kind of that. I mean, that doesn't feel like a very like, scientific thing to say. Like, we always talk about strategy being as much as the things that you don't do as it is the things that you do. And honestly, like, we didn't want to do like a startup blue, you know, we didn't want it to Facebook blue, or you know, Atlassian blue or any of these, like we just we were born on blue, you know, and then when you start to add other colors, they do have very specific connotations that come along with them, we didn't really want to do the red because we can have done that. And it was maybe a little bit too obvious and aggressive. Green has a different kind of connotation when it comes to recording or playback. So that was kind of out. And then it's like well, what are you left with? Like it was really a case of like, what are the colors that work with the rest of the color palette that we have and that was kind of it and that was the one that felt best.

Blake Howard  34:40  
One thing we've heard about in this season, if you've been tracking along is that with Tech brands, there is a need to explain the value of the product or the service via illustration. It's pretty expected these days for a rebrand to consider some wildly creative, elongated, weird set of illustrations, but I really liked dues approach to what that might be for the loom brand.

Unknown Speaker  35:03  
We wanted to avoid just jumping straight into an illustration system that a lot of SaaS companies use, we really wanted to focus as much as possible on the system and the idea of the Sladen blocks. And then we also believe pretty strongly that if we were representing a user, or someone who was recording a limb, or you were watching someone play back alone, we really wanted that to be photography, we wanted to use real people, we didn't want to use like illustrated avatars, for example, because that just feels like there's somewhat of a disconnect there. So we did a photo shoot, we did like a video shoot, we wanted those avatars to move as if someone was actually recording a loom.

Blake Howard  35:50  
A big part of a rebrand for a tech platform like loom is to go beyond tote mock ups, or fake billboards or Instagram grid mockups, and to really integrate that brand identity into the user experience itself. So I was curious how they bridge the gap between brand and product

Unknown Speaker  36:08  
on the product side, like we did a product refresh at the same time. So there was definitely like a really important process that we went through with collaborating with our product design partners on color palette, and what works and what doesn't. And do they need to had like different colors or tones, like the tape stack, we give them a starting point. But obviously, they need to work through how that translates the product. And so there was a lot of like, really useful feedback loop that came from the product designers back to us that we would then incorporate into the overall system so that we knew it would work across all of the different surfaces. I love

Blake Howard  36:44  
that I envision a series of looms about the product design of loom. Yeah. I'm curious to talk a little bit about the messaging side, because any tech startup has the challenge of communicating quickly the value of the product. So how did you all think about the message and the brand voice in this creative process,

Unknown Speaker  37:04  
the brand voice really came, I mean, honestly, it was a fairly obvious one to us, like, we didn't really need to think too hard about it. Because the conversations we're having is all about like loom allows you to be authentic, and use your own words, and your own voice and your own inflections, and, you know, your hand gestures. And so it only really made sense for the voice and tone to be the same. You know, it should be conversational, you know, it shouldn't be too stiff. You know, and I think like a lot of brands aim for that. But really, for us, like, it was the only thing that made sense, you know, like it should be informative, but not too jargony. And that's not necessarily like a revolutionary kind of position to take. But it made complete sense for us. And I think is still a work in progress as to like when when you bring like humor into the writing, and especially in the product, as opposed to just being very, very functional. But we try and keep the language as human sounding as possible, the thing that's most effective for us is just getting people in the product and having them make a video, because when they do that, for the first time, there's this kind of like a lightbulb moment, which is when you finish recording, you realize that the video has been rendering in the background the whole time, and the link is just there and ready to go almost instantly. And you can then take that link and paste that, you know whether that's a Slack message and email, an SMS, that's a lot of times like the real kind of aha moment. And so for us, like, we generally try and default to just get people in to the product as quickly as possible so that they can try it for themselves. Rather than just trying to explain every step that you may take, and what you're gonna see as you get there, we try and kind of visualize that at a high level and explain what it is. But we're never going to have one of these landing pages this super, super long that explains every single detail of the product, because we really just want to get you trained as quickly as we can.

Blake Howard  39:09  
So I'm assuming here you've got the logos sort of finalized, or you've got the right system look and feel things mostly defined. And I'm also assuming there was a little bit of a brand team who had access to these changes in these explorations, and that others in the company didn't have access to this change. So how did you start to socialize that change internally, and then I want to get to more of the external side also.

Unknown Speaker  39:34  
So first of all, like one of our company values is lead with transparency. The great thing about loom is the the conversations that we have as a team over loom. As we're doing design reviews or recaps, we would just take those and post them in a general Slack channel. We were just like for anybody who wants to follow along with the process. Here's a loom at the end of the week. You can watch what we've done, what we've messed up and what we're going to do next. You know, like, we were just open and transparent about posting that stuff to a public Slack channel, when anybody could follow along that that was interested. And so by the time we got to the end of that process, we had a whole bunch of looms, which were explaining the what the process was from start to finish, you know, and some of them were like, Yeah, we went down a rabbit hole last week, and it really didn't work at all. And we're having to kind of start from scratch and like, we have all of that stuff. So we were like, well, what can we do with it, you know, like, there's, there's no point it just sitting on our servers. So when it came time to launch, like, every day already seen it, everybody had been following along, like it was the season finale, but they'd already seen the previous like eight episodes, you know, mean, so like, nobody was like, super surprised. I want

Blake Howard  40:47  
to jump in here and say how much I love this approach, in addition to being a brilliant way to keep a team in the loop, having a video library of the creative process is fascinating to me. And I was curious if this risky move produced a plethora of disparate feedback,

Unknown Speaker  41:02  
especially when it came to the logo, people were like, wow, it makes me think of this thing. And we thought about this. And we thought about this other stuff. And we would take all of that on board. And not necessarily like action, all of that. But it was always really good to know that people were invested in it enough that they wanted to have an opinion on it. And from the start, like, we were very clear. And our very first brief, which was, this is something for all of us. This is a system that we're all going to use, we're all going to need to be invested in, we're all going to work with at some point. And so we all need to be kind of like onboard and up to speed on what it is and what it means and how it works. So only felt natural to us to really be transparent about that process. And I think actually, the transparency helps a lot, because people already understood the reasons why we'd made certain decisions, you know, like we'd already kind of given them the context. And so nobody was really reacting called, you know, nobody was just seeing something and being like, Oh, wow, that makes me think of x. Everybody was kind of like, wow, I see where you were going with that thing that you posted two weeks ago, you know, yeah,

Blake Howard  42:12  
I love that. There's also a sneaky strategy, I think in this where if you post enough looms, eventually people will be like, Okay, I know, I didn't like that logo three weeks ago, but I've seen so many looms now that it's fine. Can we just go forward with it? You know, you're like, exhausted with the process.

Unknown Speaker  42:28  
By the end, everybody was just kind of like, okay, when do we actually get the files where we can start working? Whether you know, and when do we actually get the new like Google Slides, template and stuff? You know, by the time we got to the end, everybody was kind of like, okay, we know what it is. Now. Just give us the Dropbox folder. Yeah. When do we get the tote bags do exactly, exactly right.

Blake Howard  42:52  
I love that. Okay, let's talk about launching, externally, because it seems like you were following a very similar pattern.

Unknown Speaker  42:58  
Yes, we had all these looms. We also were very honest with ourselves. And like, we just do not really want to talk about a rebrand too much like, nobody's interested, you know, like, except for this podcast. And I know, he said, for this podcast, but you know what I mean, it's just like, it feels like we've done all of this work, and the broader story of loom, it just feels like a story for a specific audience, you know, and so we didn't really have a strategy, we weren't really particularly interested in taking the time to come up with a strategy, we really just thought, we have all of these looms, we have all of this, like transparency to the process, we've shared it to the whole company the whole way through, like, why don't we just share with everybody else to, you know, like, there's no reason not to show the stuff that we've messed up, and the logo options that didn't make the car. And, you know, here's the part where we were really gonna doubt ourselves for a minute, you know, like, we feel like, that's the journey that we all go through and these projects, and there's a temptation when it comes to launching them that it's like, here's the highly edited, highlights reel, and is only the best stuff that made the final cut. And it was like this was the plan all along, when actually, as you will know, haven't done it a million times. It's like a bunch of wrong turns a bunch of dead ends a bunch of stuff that you were excited about, and then had to trash. Just a lot of hard work a lot of talking, oh, my God, was there a lot of talking, you know, and so we just had all of that material. And we were like, Okay, we shared this with the company. We'll just share it with everybody else, too. And then that was there, we just hit send on a bunch of tweets, and that was kind of it. The highlight

Blake Howard  44:47  
in this story is certainly Stuart and the loom brand teams approach to transparency in the process. It's unlike anything I've ever seen or even heard about before. And at the same time, it's kind of obvious that a collaborative video A messaging platform would take this approach, it's very meta, using the product during the process and for the rollout of the rebrand to show the value of the product, while explaining the creative decisions along the way. Again, here's to

Unknown Speaker  45:15  
it shows you the best way to understand the product is to use the product, the best way to talk about the product is just to show the product as it is used, you know, so if we're talking about loom, let's just show looms, you know, if we're talking about how it allows you to be authentic and expressive, let's just show that happening. You know, there's no like PR strategy, or can a marketing campaign that can really do that better than just showing blade, the raw material, you know,

Blake Howard  45:47  
I am a bit surprised by the downplayed consideration of the competitive landscape in this process. But I also found it kind of charming, like a confident person showing up for a dinner party, not really worried about the attire or what everyone else is wearing, just more focused on loving the outfit for themselves. I was curious how others reacted, as we discussed, the mark is pretty simple by design. So I thought surely they caught some blowback for that approach, or maybe some comparisons to other logos, right?

Unknown Speaker  46:15  
And the only pushback or the only kind of criticisms that people would say, were were like, wow, you get paid for just like messing a bunch of stuff up and then figuring, you know, it was, I think, like, a lot of times people think that the process is more like highly coordinated, or everything's very intention when done for a reason. Like, there's a bunch of happy accidents that happen along the way. There's a bunch of like, happenstance, there's a bunch of kind of something that you thought was nothing that turned into something, there's a lot of intuition that comes with it. And I think like that, sometimes takes people a little bit by surprise, because they think it's it should be all science, you know, and, and nor any are or any intuition, or any, just like, doing what you feel is right. And I think that sometimes can take folks aback, you know, when they're like, Wow, I thought it would be more like, complicated than this or more scientific this and you're like, Yeah, it really isn't, you know, it's really not rocket science, because there's no, you know,

Blake Howard  47:18  
yeah, how did customers find out? They just log into the platform? And they ask them to update? Or was there an email that went out? I mean, was there any formal communication to customers?

Unknown Speaker  47:28  
Yeah, there was an email that went out, because like, we specifically didn't want to talk about the rebrand on its own. So we tied that launch day with some other updates that we were making for our customers, we were making some product updates. We were shipping some new features. We were adjusting some stuff on the pricing side. So we shipped the rebrand at the same time as that. And so yeah, we had a lot of communication going out, which was, hey, we're making some changes here. We're really excited about them, I think you will be too. Oh, and you might notice that we've got a new kind of look and feel, you know, it was that tape of I

Blake Howard  48:05  
their strategy to sort of shrink the change, which is a Dan and Chip Heath phrase that I really like of minimizing the importance of something so that it's more easily adopted, is also very clever, and it clearly worked. So with looms more established brand identity in place in so much momentum and wind in their sails. I was curious what was next for the brand.

Unknown Speaker  48:25  
One thing that we thought for this rebrand was we thought about the idea of seasons, like we thought about, again, coming back to like a TV show analogy, like we talked a lot about TV shows that have multiple seasons, like Stranger Things, for example, it always has, you know, the same cast of characters takes place in the same location. But the storylines different, there's maybe like additional characters that commend you know, season on season. We think about this in this in the same way that there's foundationally consistent elements, but like this is the first season of the loom brand. And we're gonna move on into Season Two now, where a lot of those consistent elements remain, but we maybe just change them slightly bring in a few new elements, change some things around just to keep it fresh, but hopefully it still stays true to what we did. So that's what we're doing now.

Blake Howard  49:23  
Okay, thanks for listening. That is a wrap for today's show. And special thanks to Stuart Scott, Corinne for his time, and for giving us a behind the scenes look into the work. To see more visuals from today's episode, head on over to a change of brand calm. And if you'd like today's show, please share it with a friend or leave us a review on Apple podcasts. Just like our review of the week. Winner. Ran man 417 with a review that said quote, it's that good. Thank you rad man. 417 Be sure to DM us on Instagram to collect your matchsticks. swag. Today's episode was edited by the fabulous Matt Owen A special thanks to Sarah Gail Hughes for the briefing. And Caitlin Landauer for today's artwork. I'm your host, Blake Howard, signing off

Transcribed by https://otter.ai