Co-Founder & Head of Growth at FairShake
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Looking back, we had the good luck to relaunch our brand in one of the final weeks of a “normal” media environment. It didn’t seem that way at the time, though, as we launched on Super Tuesday.
Three months later, I’m thinking back on what my team and I learned from the experience. Above all, we learned just how many moving parts are involved in a successful rebrand: brand personality, naming, visual design, web design, web development, content migration and public relations (PR) — not to mention having a product ready to go!
Deciding To Rebrand
After raising seed funding under our prior name (Radvocate), the CEO and I recognized that this was the last moment to change the company name with relative ease. We planned for a website rebuild to take us from Squarespace to a more sophisticated platform, and we might as well “question everything,” starting with our stock image logo and the name itself.
“Radvocate” had the strength of being distinct and memorable and the weakness of being hard for some to spell or pronounce (is that second “a” long like the verb or short like the adjective?). That and the corniness factor.
A branding exercise with a trusted advisor led us to the conclusion that since our customers turn to us for help with legal disputes, the most important characteristic we want associated with our brand personality is “authoritative” (followed by “supportive” and “up to date”). This was a nail in the coffin for our prior name; we needed something less playful and more grown up.
Picking A New Name
Working with our advisor, we built broad clusters of words associated with all aspects of our brand and business. We narrowed these down to some of the best name options, heavily debated their suitableness to our brand and screened for things like web domain availability.
We ended up with “FairShake.” But, if we hadn’t had a deadline for handing a name over to our web designers, we might still be deciding!
Settling on the new name was just the beginning. We were one month into a six-month process. The remaining work would be done in close coordination with two vendors: one handling logo design, web design and web development; another providing PR support.
Web Design And Development
Choosing a design/development shop felt like an educated guess. Starting from a list of recommendations, we looked at past projects of each. Having narrowed it down to a few possibilities with portfolios of distinctive, well-executed sites, we went through a preliminary conversation with each, provided some follow-up information on what we were looking for, received proposals and moved ahead with the best bet.
Whole courses are taught on successfully managing a web development project. But here are some of the key takeaways from our experience:
• Provide your own inspiration. We turned our branding exercise outputs over to the web development shop (personas, values, etc.). But it seemed like we should give them more to start with. We put together a collection of website designs we took inspiration from and identified what we liked about them. When I look back now, this was key to ending up where we did — individual design elements made their way from this inspiration document to their final incarnation on our site.
• Take charge of the timeline. There’s no way to ask, “How are we tracking against the overall schedule?” too many times. We got good work from our friends at the design and development shop, but we knew we weren’t their only clients. We had to build a margin of error for delivery to launch on our timeline, and to do that we needed realistic timeline estimates. (We had a backup plan, too: Relaunch our core pages on time and roll out our new content management system later.)
Public Relations
Compared to web development, picking a PR firm felt much more like a shot in the dark. Outsiders who knew the PR game set low expectations going in: For a PR firm, the ideal client is a company able to pay a fat monthly retainer without looking too closely at the results. We ended up with an agency that could commit to a limited-term engagement, had experience doing work with startups and had a solid reputation for work that wasn’t cookie cutter.
One of the nice things about my job is that our company has a compelling story of helping individuals fight the system and win.
Our PR partners helped us a lot in getting our macro story told, with launch-day coverage from top tech-focused media outlets. And we saw some success in getting into ongoing news coverage on topics like vacation rental refunds and gym cancellations.
Here’s what I took away from our PR experience:
• Let them know which metrics you care about. For us, this meant communicating that we cared heavily about search engine optimization (SEO). While our PR firm knew the concept of SEO, there was education to be done about why and how it mattered to us: Backlinks to the site would help bridge whatever loss in domain authority might come with our domain migration.
• Give them lots to work with. We may have bothered our PR team with the volume of potential angles and pitch ideas we brought to them. They ended up hearing about pretty much anything in our work that we thought might have the germ of a story, or any issue in the news into which we might connect. Most of these went nowhere, but a few led to major wins.
Final Thoughts
Like any major project, the transformation from Radvocate to FairShake was a group effort, and it couldn’t have happened without the help of a lot of people inside and outside the company, especially our CEO Teel Lidow and my colleague Lauren Sliter. “It takes a village to launch a brand,” as no one says.
Now that FairShake has launched, I can't wait to see what’s next for us.
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