About our rebrand, part 3

June 15, 2018

(You can read the earlier posts where we talk about how & why we decided to rebrand here: part 1 and part 2.)

Getting Inspired

We were ready to move forward. We had a clearer idea of who our ideal customer was, what we wanted Burly Stone to look like, who we wanted it to speak to, and how we wanted it to sound. But we needed real world inspiration, and a place to pull it all together. We had an invaluable tool for this - pinterest. Usually we’re not big on it, but in this case it was really helpful. We took pictures of stuff that caught our eye, and spent hours scouring the web - colors we liked, textures, fonts, clothing, furniture, jewelry... anything that appealed to us went into a pinterest brand inspiration board. The goal with this first pass was mostly “What would our customer respond to?”

Once that first pass was done, we didn’t look at it for a week. When we came back to it we could see some common threads, stuff that was really solid - rich deep blues and coppers, rugged textures, bold fonts with hard/sharp edges, a slightly vintage feel. We duplicated the board (round 2) and cut what wasn’t working. Then we searched the web again, keeping those common threads in mind. We pulled in some fresh images and set the board aside for a week.

Then a third pass. This time it was just cutting, bring it down to a few images for each category - color, font, texture, lifestyle, mood. We tightened everything up into one final board, and we were ready to bring in the big guns – our designer. Remember, all this pinterest work - these inspiration boards, was done before we tagged them in.

We needed to have a clear focus on what WE wanted before we brought a designer onboard. Otherwise we’d just be wasting time and money. And no one wants to do that.

The Design Process

In the first meeting with our designer, we talked for a good two hours about what we wanted for Burly Stone, where we had been and where we wanted our brand to go. We showed her the inspiration boards and gave her a summary that covered our customer, our brand, and a bunch of other stuff we thought would help. We were laying the foundation so she would have a clear idea of what we wanted.

She came back a few weeks later with initial designs and tagline ideas. We looked them over, crossed some off and found a few that had potential. The ones we honed in on had all the elements we were looking for - bold, crisp shapes, a slightly vintage (but not dated) feel, and an overall “rugged but refined” feel.

We went through 2 rounds like this – refining, cutting, and wound up with 2 finalists. We agonized for weeks over a final choice, but there was one that we just kept coming back to. We knew it was the winner, but it still needed a lot of tweaks.

Once the logo was finalized, we moved onto everything else – and there were a million other things that need to be dealt with. We needed new packaging, business cards, shelf talkers, and product photos, just to start. Our rebrand is deep enough that it means we need to take a pass at EVERYTHING – this web page, all our product descriptions, our email forms, the language we use in our FAQs… everything. There were multiple rounds of revisions for everything - always tweaking and refining. It’s been a ton of work, and took a year from start to finish. But we’re at the finish line, finally. We’ve got to be honest… we’re exhausted, but couldn’t be more proud.

We've got one more post left, where we really examine our new logo & wrap this series up. In the meantime - check out our store and make sure you sign up for our newsletter here.

Thanks for reading, and remember - Be Burly!