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Intentionally rebranding your company is never an easy feat. Considering the existing collateral you already have created from print material to anything digitally (such as social media and website changes), your brand realistically has already been put into the ether. Knowing we needed to electrify the Wundertre brand was going to affect our existing collateral, we wanted to produce something that didn’t disappoint the brand loyalists who have seen “the tre” icon since its inception.
The Intent Behind Rebranding
In an ideal world, the Wundertre rebrand should be something simple, yet powerful. Something you can immediately associate with “oh I know who that is” by just a glance or even a small portion of the icon or text. When rebranding Wundertre, brainstorming the major overhaul was narrowed down to two points.
One point was redesigning the font. Wundertre has had a litany of fonts over the years, and unfortunately, none of them identified us with our brand archetypes. Especially with the primary archetype being “The Jester”, we felt that the previous wordmark used the strong iconography as a crutch, couldn’t stand on its own, and definitely wasn’t as fun as we try to portray ourselves as. In recent collateral, there was a clear distinction to highlight only the icon. For lack of a better term, the font was anchoring down what we believed to be a very strong icon. So the main intent was to get that font up to date, not only with our branding but with the current climate as well.
Secondarily, the point we needed to portray as an “elevated” feel from all the previous brandmarks. We love where we’re at with the tree making such a strong push to be our own icon, but with changes to the font, came slight tweaks to the icon itself. We felt the necessity to keep the core of the logo the same as it’s always been. The straight edges of the old icon paired better with the previous font and not so well with this softer, friendlier font. With the changes to soften the font came the opportunity to shift the icon in the same direction. This softer edge on the Wundertre logo as a whole has helped the logo work extraordinarily well on the new “wave” color background. Another change we made to the icon was giving it some added depth in an alternative form.
The alternate icon now using the main tree logo as a cutout helps provide more opportunities for branding that should carry over into all mediums very well. During some of the research sessions, the Mailchimp brand came up that made a similar transition recently. Moving away from the cursive font and making the brand name two words, the MailChimp branding team made the shift to an all-lowercase font, a simplified “Freddie” logo, and a bright, powerful color palette with a ton of contrast. We felt that this made such a major change for the good in their branding, that we wanted to accomplish something similar.
Additional Changes For Our Rebranding
With an overhaul of this magnitude, there were plenty of things that followed that also needed to be changed. With this new brandmark, we realized that the current color palette was so diverse that it actually distracted from the focal point of highlighting our branding. We haven’t gotten rid of all of the fun Wundertre colors, but some have taken a back seat for the time being. We’ve also narrowed down the patterns with which those colors are paired. The old pattern combos haven’t gone away either, but with the intent to be more dedicated to the brand we’ve limited the uses of those color combinations to very specific use cases.
Another change that was in order was the infamous Wundertre chime. This one was very tricky because sonic branding is harder to nail down. We wanted to create something that felt unique to us, and that also paid homage to the brands we’ve used in the past. The previous chime was fun and playful, but this new chime has undertones of playful while also being professional and sophisticated. We want clients to know that as lighthearted as we can be, we still take every situation as seriously as any major company would. We believed that this chime was a perfect combination that could end up receiving recognition just from hearing it.
And finally, one of the most interesting challenges was creating a new animation for the chime and logo. Nothing too subtle, but not overly playful either. The real challenge of creating a chime and an animation is that it can be a “chicken or the egg” situation. Do you design the animation around the chime you made or vice versa? In our case, we created many chimes to test and they just didn’t feel like us, so we moved to the animation and came back. In our case, we found that seeing what your brand looks like helps you envision what it can sound like as well. The quick animation and its subtle color “glitches” paired with the chime finally felt like a true upgrade to the previous chime and its heavily playful claps.
To Conclude Our Rebranding
We believe that the Wundertre brand is something unique and has gained traction from our simplistic brand imagery and we didn’t want to take away from what we had built. However, all facets of our original branding were quickly approaching a “dated” look that we didn’t want to carry on further into our future and our successes. I think I would say, don’t take your brand’s imagery lightly. If you think you need a rebrand, really dive into the research and understand what that entails. If you come to the conclusion that your branding may suffer from a dated look in a few years, it may be time to look into a refresh. Even something that you roll out over time may be a good approach to a rebranding slow burn.
If you need to do a rebrand or research on rebranding but aren’t sure when or where to start, contact us today! Our team is ready and willing to put in the time and effort to guide you in elevating your brand to the next stratosphere.