Stories
Case Study: Gamer Supps Levels Up Their AOV With Rebuy
Opportunity takes many forms. In the case of Gamer Supps, it was disguised as a colorful group of online shoppers: anime fans.
Look good, feel good.
A rebrand is part of the natural cycle of business.
And if you plan to grow your company, it's downright critical. Because over time, a brand can become dated. Apple has rebranded 3 times. Pepsi, 11.
Rebuy? We've done it once. 😎
As our business surged throughout 2021 and more and more merchants joined the platform, we started to take a hard look at how we were showing up in the market. That meant evaluating everything from our color palette and fonts to our website and messaging. (And yes, even our logo.) Did the look and feel of our brand make an impression? What attributes did merchants associate with our brand? Did it all sync up?
It became clear that if we wanted to keep growing, we needed to update our visual identity—and strengthen our brand overall. Once that realization hit, we dove in. Of course, we made plenty of mistakes, suffered delays, and scrapped several ideas. But we learned throughout the process. And in the end, we walked away with a fresh brand that has reenergized our organization, excited our supporters, and prepared Rebuy for future growth. 🚀
Here's how it all went down.
Backstory
Rebuy started in 2019 with a small group of scrappy engineers (led by our founders) who focused on building the smartest ecommerce personalization product on the market.
Our mission was—and still is—to enable merchants to create intelligent shopping experiences. As a company focused on people and product, we wanted to continue providing innovative solutions for merchants to grow and increase revenue. Meanwhile, month by month we saw our product, our team, and our merchant base steadily growing.
By the end of 2021, we had 16 people on our team, 2,000 customers, and were wrapping up a successful seed round. With all the work that went into those two years of massive growth, this was the first time that our founders were able to pause, look up, and take stock of what Rebuy had grown into.
Two things were crystal clear:
- Rebuy was not only here to stay, we were here to deliver the leading personalization solution in commerce.
- We were a team of excited, innovative individuals with a killer product that people loved.
However, one thing remained a bit unclear—the brand.
With our focus on product and people, the brand had taken a backseat and was left to develop organically.
Why Now?
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We had a special product, and we were seeing outstanding results. Merchants loved it. So did partners and agencies. Yet, we didn’t feel our brand was doing us justice as a young and innovative company. The mix of green, white, and dark blue, resulted in a sort of traditional, corporate feel. Not the fun, energetic, vibrant company culture we were creating on the inside.
We needed a brand that more accurately reflected not only our team but the merchants using the platform, and their customers who were engaging with the product millions of times per day. One that captures the excitement of what we're building and the types of industry-leading merchants we work with.
We wanted a strong, modern brand that authentically communicated who we are as a company to the merchants we wanted to reach. A fresh visual identity that aligned with our values—not an afterthought.
Initially, we tasked our only designer, our only marketer, and our founders to take on this rebrand. We set our deadline as May 4th, the day our founder was slated to speak at an annual conference. And we wanted to use that opportunity to debut our fresh, new look.
By May 4th, we had grown into a team of over 50 employees, many of whom contributed significantly to bringing this vision to life.
Goals
We had two main goals for the rebrand.
1. Refresh our visual identity.
We aimed to create a revamped identity that better showcased our company’s personality.
2. Update our marketing site.
Our old site served an important purpose but had run its course. It was inconsistent in color and style, felt very developer-focused, and didn’t properly showcase the merchants we were working with. Our site needed to be the canvas where we painted a strong picture of Rebuy as a company, and also as a platform - highlighting our partners and merchants.
Discovery Process
We knew our brand identity needed help but we wanted to check with our merchants and get first-hand feedback from the people who interact with our company the most.
We sent our merchants a survey to gauge their perception of the brand, asking questions like, “How would you describe Rebuy’s brand to a friend?” and "What was your first impression of the brand?"
We found that merchants enjoyed our product and knew we could boost AOV through cross-sells and upsells. But that was about the extent of it. Our brand didn't seem to resonate in the minds of our customers, and most weren't sure who we were as a company or what our platform was capable of.
Taking what we learned from our merchants, we then turned inward 🧘 and held a company-wide branding workshop.
As a team, we answered questions like:
- How do we, the builders of the Rebuy product, view Rebuy the brand?
- Where do we see it going?
- How do we want our users to perceive the brand?
Focusing on developing a brand personality, we set to finding words that exemplified Rebuy.
As a team, we chose words like:
- Intelligent
- Innovative
- Supportive
- Transformative
- Exciting
This initial team workshop helped kick off our creative process. And with research and inspiration on our side, we headed into Figma to get started reworking our colors.
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Colors
We started by making our current color palette a little more lively. Brightened up the greens, added more contrast, and played around with blues. Greens and blues are well-charted waters, and would probably keep us fairly recognizable, but it just wasn’t it. We gave it a fair shot, but ultimately, we decided it was time to let go of the green. If we wanted our brand to be innovative and modern, we needed to start fresh.
So naturally, we swung to the other side of the color wheel to find our primary color: pink. We experimented until we found juuussttt the right shade, then added a vivid blue. And a yellow shade to use as an accent for darker backgrounds. We felt these were bright, bold, and could be used in a myriad of ways including our brand gradient.
The "Rebuy Gradient" not only allows us to use our colors in new and fresh ways but represents how dynamic and diverse we are as a team. We also created a neutral palette for external and co-marketing use. We are first and foremost a platform for our merchants, and just like our product, we want our brand to seamlessly integrate wherever possible.
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Typeface & Brandmark
For our typeface, we wanted to keep it simple. As you can tell, plenty of thought was going into our new brand identity, and with a small, scrappy startup team, you have to pick your battles.
We’re all pretty big design nerds over here and could have easily spent a month deciding what fonts we wanted to use for the brand. Or, we could choose a clean, modern font that’s easy to read and move on. You can probably guess the route we went here. Museo Sans is well-loved and well-read, along with Sofia Pro.
We had the colors and the typeface, and now it was time to rework our logo and incorporate them. Our old logo wasn’t bad, and we love the infinity sign and what it represents about our product, so it really just needed some lipstick. What we didn’t love: The multi-color effect and the readability when the logo was at a small size. So, we made it one tone, updated the font, and simplified the infinity sign.
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Marketing Site
With step one of our rebrand complete, it was time to apply the new brand assets to our marketing site.
Our now two-person design team, in tandem with our marketing team, took on the redesign. Most of our copy was great, but we needed a full visual rebrand. Aside from our new fonts and colors, we created a custom icon set to use along with the Material UI icons. We also needed to update all of the graphics on the site. Not only to better represent our new brand but to highlight our incredible merchants.
Once the design was finished and approved, our designers built out the site in Hubspot. We chose Hubspot to ensure our marketing site could stay a living, breathing entity of Rebuy. We’re a fast-moving company, and we wanted a site that we could update quickly when needed.
We woke up early on May 4th and hit publish as a team.
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What Did We Learn?
If we could give ourselves (or anyone else looking to rebrand) any advice, it might be to trust and rely on Process. A rebranding is a giant undertaking. You have to consider the individual brand assets, how they work together, how they will transfer to marketing materials, how they will look across multiple platforms and in conjunction with other brands, etc.
Luckily though, rebranding is hardly a new frontier. Researching what other companies have done and their processes was an essential first step. Aligning that with our goals and creating a roadmap allowed the creative process to run smoothly.
We also learned how crucial it is to have solid communication on your team. Having a clear vision, goal, and desired outcomes helped keep all the moving pieces and people in sync and on track.
Teamwork was paramount in getting this exciting project completed and we want to give a huge thanks to our entire team for working tirelessly to support this project.
We feel our fresh new brand encapsulates not only our leading-edge product but the innovative and diverse team behind it. We care deeply about what we do here, and now it feels like our brand better expresses how invested and excited we are about the Rebuy mission.
All-in-all, we’re pumped about our fresh new look and our new site. And so stoked to have a brand that represents us.
Look good, feel good, right? 💅
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