FreshBooks Rebrand
My most impactful project while working at FreshBooks was the rebrand. After 15 years, the existing logo didn’t reflect how much the company and its products had matured. To modernize and elevate FreshBooks in the market a rebrand was essential.
Create a purpose statement.
Truths in hand, we worked on a purpose statement, which wasn’t about what we were doing or how, it was about why we were doing it.
We took a narrative approach to this statement, calling it the True Nature of Business, shown here.
Evolve the visual identity.
Before pushing pixels, we needed to define the problem. For us that meant identifying issues with our original logo, noting what we wanted to keep, and clarifying how it was holding us back.
It had too many elements, we wanted to simplify and enhance its clarity.
While organic and humanly imperfect, our original logo didn’t meet our professional standards.
Our core brand colours weren’t accessible.
On a more positive note, we wanted to retain some of the heritage of our original design. And, most importantly, our new logo needed to communicate what we represent: Standing beside business owners on their journey of growth.
Of course, a logo isn’t a brand…
After a fully developed colour palette, font hierarchy, voice and tone, messaging hierarchy, and many other parts of the rebrand came together, so did the logo.
Following this milestone, there was still a lot of work to be done:
Stress testing the rebrand against existing creative and marketing channels.
Building out an extended colour palette and doubling down on accessibility.
Shopping it around the company for feedback and input.
Launching customer field trials, user tests, surveys, etc.
The list goes on, but in the end, it definitely resulted in a significant brand lift in our major markets, was essential to international expansion, and allowed the creative, marketing and product teams to create a more seamless branded experience throughout the customer journey.
Where to start?
Branding helps intuitively convey who you are as a company and how you show up in the world, a.k.a. your purpose. For FreshBooks, it was simple: To stand beside business owners on their journey of growth.
To get this right, that purpose should be part of the company culture. So we started from the inside and worked outward, starting with finding truth in our proudest moments.
We asked hundreds of FreshBookers about their proudest moments through a series of internal workshops. The result was distilled phrases like the ones shown here.
These statements became the North Star for everything that followed.
Wear it for a while.
Next, we wanted to ‘try on’ our brand story and purpose to make sure it fit well.
Practically, this came together as a cross-company ‘brand fair,’ where FreshBookers presented dozens of concepts of their own creation based on the purpose statement. With guidance from myself and my brand team, dozens of teams presented things like enhancements to our product, how we market ourselves, and even upgrades to office operations.
Exploration.
Our exploration started by looking at what we had designed over the years, what worked, and what didn’t.
We looked at our competitors and what they were doing (in no small part to ensure we stood out against them).
We compiled examples of companies outside our category that we admire, for inspiration.
We had dozens of conversations with the founders of the company.
While working through this visual exploration, we also started the evolution of the brand voice and tone. This took on a similar exploratory direction, with lots of research based on our purpose statement and input from the employees and founders.
