How we did a rebrand in 3 weeks with 3 people
Exactly how we pulled it off, how it turned out, and our lessons learned from it.
A few weeks ago, we did a rebrand.
We did it all in just 3 weeks, and with only 3 people.
Yes, you read that correctly.
We came up with a new company name, designed a new company logo, created new marketing materials, set up all the technical aspects for a new domain, etc. for our new product – all in 3 weeks with a 3-person team.
Below I share exactly why, how we did it, our results so far, and what we learned.
Why just 3 weeks?
Whenever I asked a fellow founder if they’d done a rebrand before, the response I received always came in the form of a warning.
“Oh it’ll take you at least 8 months...” one founder told me.
Another said: “Oh watch out, that spirals into a much bigger, drawn-out project than you think.”
As a small company, I knew that we didn’t have the luxury of 8 months. Too many leaders rely on our day-to-day work of supporting their leadership growth and development. It almost felt irresponsible for us as a company to get side tracked with finessing what our logo should be.
Sure, a rebrand would be helpful for underlining and supporting our vision. Our focus as a company had expanded over the last decade. Our existing name and brand didn’t reflect that accurately. A rebrand absolutely did make sense…
But I didn’t want us as a company to get distracted from the core of what’s most important in our work: How we help our leaders get better each and every day.
As a result, I decided on a timeframe that I thought could realistically produce a high-quality outcome with the minimum amount of time spent.
Three weeks felt right. A timeframe that would help our customers: Give them a brand that underlined our vision, while also making sure we quickly got back to our core work of helping them each day through our Canopy leadership improvement app and our Canopy for Teams leadership training services.
How we broke down the 3 weeks
Week 1: We picked the new company name.
The naming process included…
Putting together a Naming Brief with 6 criteria for what we wanted our ideal name to have. (Took a few hours.)
2 days to brainstorm hundreds of names, and narrow down to Top 30.
1 day to narrow down the name to Top 8 names, based on the naming brief. (We ranked each name on a numerical scale, and used those numbers to narrow down our selection.)
Due diligence on our top choices to research on trademarks, available domains, etc. (About half a day.)
1 day to narrow down from Top 8 to final selection.
Feedback from a few trusted customers and stakeholders, once we’d narrowed it down to our final selection. (We did this via email, so took maybe a few hours.)
1 day just sitting on the name, trying it out in our app, marketing materials etc.
Fun tidbit: The one thing that pushed us over the edge in deciding the name “Canopy” was examining our Customer Success Stories and replacing the old company name with the new proposed company name “Canopy” to see how they would read “from mouths” so-to-speak of customers…. We realized very quickly that the right choice was “Canopy” from this.
Week 2: We designed the logo.
The logo process included:
1 - 2 days of hand-drawn, low-fidelity sketches of about 35 - 50 different logo concepts from our incredible designer James Goode.
Narrowed down to about 5 to 10 concepts – and then, each day from there, James, our co-founder and CTO Daniel Lopes, and myself (CEO), would meet and give feedback and further narrow down which concepts we liked, until the logo got more refined. From there, we picked our final version.
Logos are deceptively hard. There are about a million iterations you can do for a single concept – not including color! – and it’s also incredibly subjective. We did end up spending closer to 8 total business days (rather than the original allotted 5 days) on the logo, as at the very end, we decided to try a more geometric logo that invoked a sense of support calm.
Week 3: We prepared all the technical aspects and marketing materials.
This included:
All our technical changes, such us our domain, SAML and other 3rd party integrations, email deliveries, SEO work etc. Definitely non-trivial. Our CTO Daniel spent the first 2 weeks prior to this planning ahead of time to make sure all the work could fit into the allotted time. Then he handed things off to our Senior Programmer Marcus Derencius during Week 3, who singlehandedly executed the full technical transition.
All our marketing material changes, such as our marketing site, social media accounts, sales assets, marketing videos, etc. We have a lot 😅 and so decided to focus only changing on the most essential ones, for the time being, that could fit into getting done in one week. More on this below in the “Biggest Lessons Learned” section of this post.
Communications to customers. We gave our existing customers a heads up ahead of the public launch, so folks wouldn’t be too surprised by the change.
Communications for our launch – especially our rebrand announcement.
Then, we launched the rebrand on April 10th, 2024.
How’d it go?
It’s only been a few weeks since we launched the rebrand. But so far: The rebrand has worked resoundingly well.
An overwhelmingly number of customers and supporters have told us how much they love the new name and new logo, and how it better reflects our work….
We also gained a significantly larger audience with the rebrand. When we went public with the rebrand, we gained more sign-ups that single week than we usually do in a single month. And since rebrand launch week, we’ve still had 2X - 3X more sign-ups per day than prior to the rebrand.
Full disclosure: We’re a spin-off of 37signals. And so we were lucky enough to receive a nice boost in visibility from their founders Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson sharing our story that week….
Most importantly, the three-week timeline meant that once we were done, we were home free. We could go back to the mission-critical, day-to-day activities and investments that matter most to the leaders we serve.
Yes, there are of course lingering to-dos. But for the most part, we are back to fully serving our leaders with improvements to our Canopy leadership improvement app and running our Canopy for Teams leadership training services.
Biggest lessons learned
As CEO, here are my 4 personal biggest takeaways from doing a 3-week rebrand…
(1) Be willing to walk away.
With each passing day that we worked on the rebrand, I would pause, and ask our team: “Are we happy with where this is at? Does it make sense to continue? We can always turn back. We can always walk away.”
If we didn’t find a new name we liked in 1 week, we wouldn’t continue.
If we didn’t come up with a logo we liked by end of the 2nd week, we’d stop.
We would do the rebrand if and only if, each step of the way, we felt that it was 100% what was best for the business and for our customers. We always gave ourselves the option to walk away.
Sunk cost fallacy is seductive swamp – and avoiding it means being explicit about the other roads through the woods we could take.
After all, we didn’t have to change our company name. Our previous company name (“Know Your Team”) was just fine. It’d worked well enough for the past 10 years. It probably could work pretty well for the next ten.
We didn’t have to change anything. Keeping that perspective, and giving ourselves permission to change our mind, helped stay calm throughout the process.
Rather than feeling like our hair was on fire 24/7, we felt in control. Rather than feeling backed into a corner, we felt like we had options.
As I reflect, I think this is true of almost any big project. You always have more choice than you think you do.
Instead of riding the tunnel-vision narrative of “I must achieve this goal because I said I would,” you’re now spending time on something because “I think this in puts us in the best position for where we want to be.”
The ability to walk away gives you a chance at the results you actually want, rather than results you unintentionally end up with.
(2) Accept the existential.
I’ve always believed I had a healthy relationship with my work. That my identity and sense-of-self is fully formed outside of my company.
Boy, did this rebrand process sure challenge that notion! 😅
As much as I’d prefer to deny it, choosing a new company name felt like choosing a new name for myself as a person. Choosing the logo, felt like choosing a new personal identity.
“Does it feel like me?” I wondered often times in the process.
You could say that this is perhaps not a bad or wrong thing, especially given that the work we do is personal and very people-focused: We help leaders feel supported and grow. Yet, I think I was taken aback about the existential questions that crept up in the process. “Who are we as a company? Who am I?”
A rebrand is a much more emotional process than we credit it as. It’s not like choosing a new marketing channel, or deciding you’re going all-in on a different product strategy. Rebranding is an inherently personal, subjective decision. There really isn’t anyone who can tell you what the “right” name is or “right” logo is, no matter how much research you do, how many books you read, or how many podcasts you listen to.
So accept the subjectivity. Know that for the most part, you’re leaning on personal taste. Of course, do root it in what you can find to be objective, as it makes sense (for example, how does this actually support your vision and business goals). But don’t be surprised by the emotional nature of the process.
Acknowledge and accept the existential identity crisis it will undoubtedly trigger.
(3) Keep the decision committee small.
When you rebrand, it’s tempting to crowdsource opinions. However, often the more voices in the room, the harder it is to hear any voice.
As a result, we kept the decision committee exceedingly small. Just 3 people: Myself (CEO), co-founder and CTO Daniel, and our designer James. Then, I would have final say on the decision.
We’re a small company to begin with, so we don't have precedents for 20-person committees, which is helpful. But this intentional move to make sure only 3 people were the ones contributing names, giving feedback on logo kept us moving fast.
Of course, we kept the whole company in the loop every few days on our progress. And they were invited to give input along the way if they wanted.
But only the 3 folks on the “decision committee” were active participants in the naming and logo process.
Speed tends to happens when you keep things small.
(4) Prioritize only what people are going to care about.
When you start creating the list of to-dos for a rebrand, you start to realize very quickly that there’s a million things you’d like to change.
Logo appears in X thousand many places. Name is fossilized in X hundreds of podcasts, videos, other assets.
The list starts to become overwhelming long.
So we decided to be ruthless about was only changing what was absolutely necessary – and that’s it.
No one’s really going to care if the logo isn’t updated on an obscure marketing PDF right away.
As long as we covered the basics, we were good.
For us, the basics were:
New name
New logo
Domain changes
Marketing site changes
In-app changes
Everything else could wait.
Do only what people are going to care about.
Applying this to your own project
Full caveat, it’s still a lot of work. Whether it’s 3 weeks, 3 months, or a year – whatever time you set aside for your rebrand (or any big project) will feel exhausting.
I needed real time to rest, after we launched the rebrand. And I think I still need more recovery time, more than I’m willing to admit.
The lessons I shared here are by no means a “shortcut” or hack. No, no, no. All meaningful, high-quality projects require effort and time.
Rather, I hope they give insight into how a big meaty project can be done on a shorter timescale with a smaller team, than we originally think.
Constraints are beautifully useful. Without the forcing function, you fall to the common dominator. You otherwise self-justify the current pace, the current priorities. Without constraints, there is no real attempt to find out what is possible.
Hoping these lessons here and breakdown are helpful for you, whether you’re doing a rebrand yourself, or are staring down the barrel of a big project that has real constraints.
More is possible than you originally think.
Rooting for you!
-Claire
P.S. Would love to know what you think of the latest Canopy with our rebrand! Come poke around here.