Our New Look is Just the Beginning
Ben Kurland, Co-Founder
We're changing the way we look. It's time to catch up with the company we've become and prepare for the future we're trying to build. Our core values, helping people save money by fighting back against mega-corporations, haven't changed, but we want to do them smarter, faster, and better. So we figured we should look the part!
The old BillFixers logo is something I threw together in about 5 minutes to test out a new name we were playing with for a company idea we had. The old BillFixers color was "picked" because it was the default color for the wordpress theme we bought and it was easier than changing all the settings. It was never really supposed to live beyond our fun little website experiment and we spent a little while playing around with little illustrations of hammers and wrenches before getting distracted with actually saving people money.Here we are, three years, twenty team members, millions of dollars, and a couple website redesigns later, still using the same look. We knew it was time for a change.
A new look for a new future.
With design help from Deividas Bielskis
My background is graphic design and I've been lucky enough to do branding work for a variety of awesome organizations. But as in law, a designer who does all their own work has a fool for a client. I reached out to a few awesome designers I followed on Dribbble and after a few back and forths, ultimately settled on the wildly talented Deividas Bielskis.We put together a design brief for him, focusing on what we were looking for—staying trustworthy, approachable, and consumer-focused, and also giving us the flexibility to continue our expansion into an advanced fintech player. We rounded up a couple of companies whose design we love, like Robinhood, Asana, and Slack and set him to work.
"Our core values, helping people save money by fighting back against mega-corporations, haven't changed, but we want to do them smarter, faster, and better."
We went back and forth on tons of concepts, hitting ones that we liked but weren't quite right. Some days one of us would like us, but not all of us. Some days I'd tinker with things he'd done and send them back. Being on the other side of the designer-client equation, I knew we were nightmare clients. Always trust your designer. But we'd half-assed this once and I wasn't gonna do that that again. I knew the right look was out there.
We went through a lot of looks that were awesome, but just weren't right for us.
Again, all design credit here goes to Deividas Bielskis
After four months of that, we hit it. We got an email with a new logo that we knew we could build around. We tested out a dozen iterations of (from the outside) identical bright green; we argued about BillFixers vs. BILLFIXERS vs. billfixers; we chose fonts and department styling; we made mockups of websites and business cards and billboards. I reached out to some very talented people (including the fantastic Alex Deane) for advice. And we finalized it.
Rebranding your startup after you've gained some traction isn't easy. You grow attached to the stupid wordmark you put together when you were still two dudes on a couch. You worry about whether you're changing things for the worse. And all the A/B testing and feedback in the world ultimately can't tell you if you're making the right decision.People love to write long, basically nonsensical treatises explaining their rebrands. I've been guilty of it myself (including right now.) I won't go on about golden ratio or the symbolism I see in the little folded thing that makes up the B. Ultimately, the real reason we wanted a new logo was because the old one was boring and didn't have anything that fit neatly in a favicon.
Still, I'm—we're—really excited about this. We know our values; we know who we want to be and strive to be. You're not just what you look like. If you were, we would still be a couple of guys guessing at the best phone number to call and hoping we said the right thing. If you were, we wouldn't have been able to build an amazing team or to have solved impossible situations or to have actually started to make some dents in our windmills. But at the end of the day, you only get one chance to make a first impression. These are the choices that we'll use to build our technology, to greet people on social media who are being taken advantage of and don't know where to turn, to strike partnerships that allow us to expand how many people we can help. It's been our total honor to get to do all that and so much more. And at the end of the day, I'd like to think that our clients go with us because of the amazing diligence of our customer experience team and the fact that we can save them more on average than anybody out there, rather than whether our name is in uppercase or lowercase. And I know for a fact that our incredible team would be kicking ass no matter what flag they were flying under. Still, I can't help but be excited for our new look.You're not what you look like, but you might as well be proud of it.
Caroline Wyatt on September 11, 2017 at 8:26 pm
Congratulations on your courage to start the company.
The logo = killer 🙂