After what feels like an eternity, but was actually the 6 longest months of our lives, we are SO excited to share our brand new branding and website with you. It has been such a labor of love and so hard to keep a secret from you. It was a long overdue renovation, and we are so happy that it is finally complete. We hope that you love it too cause you all were at the forefront of our minds with every decision that we made along the way. We thought that we would share a little insight to the journey for funzzies but also so that any you who are going through a rebranding process don’t feel so alone. When your brand is your baby, it can be so hard. We worked with the amazing Megan from Grit Design Co and the brilliant Ryan and Nick from Roundhouse Designs to design and build the new site!
For starters, here is our first site and the version of the site we had before this one.Literally, anything would have been an improvement from this. We had built the site ourselves using a basic magazine style WordPress theme. At first, we loved it, but we grew out of it probably a year ago and I kid you not I wanted to turn away, throw up, or cry every time I went to our site over the past say 8 months. That is not how you should feel about your business and was the clear sign that we needed an overhaul. I am going to be completely honest with you, I think not loving our own website has affected our attitudes about blogging and the content that we produced.
We filled out a survey for Megan and she got to work on our first round of moodboards. Here were the two options that she sent back.
Moodboard #1
We liked the gold foil texture, the contrast of the black and white of the first one but the colors were too mature and too masculine.
Moodboard #2
We loved the, pops of yellow, the sketchy design of the couch, the hollow letter that read “layer”, the variation of colors and neutrals, and the clean light gray. We thought that it might be a little too young or tropical.
Round two, Megan got it SO right! We absolutely loved this color palette and mood board. It really captures the energy we want to portray while being appealing to the younger and older members of our audience.Now it was on to logo designs.
Round two, Megan got it SO right! We absolutely loved this color palette and mood board. It really captures the energy we want to portray while being appealing to the younger and older members of our audience.Now it was on to logo designs.
Now it was on to logo designs. This was by far the most difficult part. I think too often I look at our logo and think that it needs to capture everything that we do. But branding is so much more than a logo.
Here is the first round of logos.
1) We liked the idea of including craft supplies but for some reason, just these scissors looked like a hair dresser’s logo, and the established date seemed to imply that we are a brick and mortar store.
Here is the first round of logos.
1) We liked the idea of including craft supplies but for some reason, just these scissors looked like a hair dresser’s logo, and the established date seemed to imply that we are a brick and mortar store.
2) We didn’t want to use the abbreviation and we didn’t like that scissor design. It looked like a bike to me in the middle of that design.
3) Way to plain but we liked the boxiness and the fixed width.
4) The font and the design were too whimsical. Too much going on overall.
Part of the process of finding a logo that you love is figuring out what you don’t like. This step showed us a lot of that. We gave Megan this feedback and told her that wanted something with a little more dimension and pattern or craft supplies incorporated into the design.
With this next set of logos we were definitely headed in the right direction and our spirits started to lift a little. #1,# 2, and #4 all had the fixed width that I loved. We really liked the pattern and dimension of #1 and #2. Our least favorite of all of them was #3. This is where the process should have stopped.
But no, Courtney was persistent and wanted those craft supplies incorporated into the design. So she tried her hand at it and came up with these. She loved them because she doesn’t like change and they were so similar to our last logo. We all hoped on a call, and Megan pointed that out to us. She said she would do it, but that it wasn’t a sleek modern logo like we had originally said we wanted. She was so right. It really took her saying this to make us realize that we were resisting the change when we should be embracing it. We looked at all her logo designs again with this new perspective.
With this new mindset, we fell in love with our least favorite from the last round of designs. It filled all of our requirements. Megan then came up with some awesome patterns and stamp marks. With these elements, we were ready to move on to the web development stage with our buddies from Roundhouse Designs.
The first thing that we did was re-categorize every single post on the site to make them easier for you all to find. Holy cow did this take awhile, but what good is content if you can’t find it right? So definitely worth it.
Right off the bat, Ryan and Nick pretty much knocked it out of the park. We customized a few things in our sidebar, ended up adding 5 featured images across to top instead of 4, and we added a pop of color with the colorful X background.When you click on a category in the menu, you are taken to a category page that has beautiful custom stock imagery. We came up with this idea but could not execute it ourselves. So we got Chaitra from PinkPot Studio on board. We couldn’t be more thrilled with her photography. She is brilliant behind the lens.And probably the most needed change- we are now optimized on mobile! Our last site resembled a train wreck on mobile. Nothing looked how it should and nothing worked. Not anymore though! So all of you that are attached to your phone at the hip (like we are) can peruse the site while you are out and about.
We have never been more excited to make content for you guys. Awesome content that is worthy of being on this dreamy site. If you follow us on Instagram, you may have already noticed a change in our branding and content. When we finished the branding part of the process, we really started to focus on our insta feed and have it reflect the vibe we want our brand to have. You will start to see a change across all of our channels and brand. Based on the amazing response and growth on Insta gram in the past couple of months, we think that this will be a change that you all are happy with.Holy cow, I am seriously impressed if you made it this far in the post! I think this might be one of the longest posts we have written in a while, we just had so much to say about the process and the finished product!
With this next set of logos we were definitely headed in the right direction and our spirits started to lift a little. #1,# 2, and #4 all had the fixed width that I loved. We really liked the pattern and dimension of #1 and #2. Our least favorite of all of them was #3. This is where the process should have stopped.
But no, Courtney was persistent and wanted those craft supplies incorporated into the design. So she tried her hand at it and came up with these. She loved them because she doesn’t like change and they were so similar to our last logo. We all hoped on a call, and Megan pointed that out to us. She said she would do it, but that it wasn’t a sleek modern logo like we had originally said we wanted. She was so right. It really took her saying this to make us realize that we were resisting the change when we should be embracing it. We looked at all her logo designs again with this new perspective.
With this new mindset, we fell in love with our least favorite from the last round of designs. It filled all of our requirements. Megan then came up with some awesome patterns and stamp marks. With these elements, we were ready to move on to the web development stage with our buddies from Roundhouse Designs.
The first thing that we did was re-categorize every single post on the site to make them easier for you all to find. Holy cow did this take awhile, but what good is content if you can’t find it right? So definitely worth it.
Right off the bat, Ryan and Nick pretty much knocked it out of the park. We customized a few things in our sidebar, ended up adding 5 featured images across to top instead of 4, and we added a pop of color with the colorful X background.When you click on a category in the menu, you are taken to a category page that has beautiful custom stock imagery. We came up with this idea but could not execute it ourselves. So we got Chaitra from PinkPot Studio on board. We couldn’t be more thrilled with her photography. She is brilliant behind the lens.And probably the most needed change- we are now optimized on mobile! Our last site resembled a train wreck on mobile. Nothing looked how it should and nothing worked. Not anymore though! So all of you that are attached to your phone at the hip (like we are) can peruse the site while you are out and about.
We have never been more excited to make content for you guys. Awesome content that is worthy of being on this dreamy site. If you follow us on Instagram, you may have already noticed a change in our branding and content. When we finished the branding part of the process, we really started to focus on our insta feed and have it reflect the vibe we want our brand to have. You will start to see a change across all of our channels and brand. Based on the amazing response and growth on Insta gram in the past couple of months, we think that this will be a change that you all are happy with.Holy cow, I am seriously impressed if you made it this far in the post! I think this might be one of the longest posts we have written in a while, we just had so much to say about the process and the finished product!
Phew, you still with me!? I encourage you to play around a bit on the site and check things out! I hope you love it as much as we do. It’s been a long time coming and we’re so happy to have a new little look for this corner of the Internet! One last THANK YOU to Megan, Ryan and Nick, and Chaitra for their creativity and hard work!
