iomando Brand Redesign

One of the most surprising things I’ve learned in almost three amazing years at iomando is the inherent value of a brand and how it is perceived. Shipping great stuff is key, but the frame you design and the story you create around it are, at least, just as important.

A company is an ever-evolving creature. It is constantly touching customers and stakeholders, leaving a trace or impression behind each interaction. Therefore, the sum of every interaction is what ultimately builds your brand and how you are perceived from the outside. Brand value is really a complex, beautiful idea that we wanted to better understand at iomando.

Because of this, the story you create around the company and the message (in whichever form) you deliver is ultimately what you’ll become. The brand is also built by the product, of course, but this only tells you a limited part of the story. The whole brand is a polyhedric figure that goes from the product, the message you get outside, the tone, your marketing material, the customer support, the culture within the company… and even trickles down to the sole fact of who does the dishes late at night in the office.

Although we’ve never had a dedicated person to guide brand value at iomando, we recognized its importance from the beginning. For that reason, we’ve only had one simple rule at iomando to steer brand value: common sense. I know it’s broad, not particularly specific, and even confusing, but it worked for us. It worked mainly because of the way we hire and how we look for enthusiasm and a set of shared values in new candidates. Because of that, we have the assurance that we are all looking in the same direction when it comes to building the company.

That’s a story for another day, though, because today I want to focus on one of the most important and visual aspects of the brand: the logo, its colors and the imagery that wraps every bit of interaction we ship, from the mobile icon in your phone home screen to the signature on the bottom of an employee’s email.

At iomando we’ve always tried to embed clarity and ease of use into every aspect of the company. We’ve always put a lot of effort into crafting the experience and trying to understand each step of the process, and, as a co-founder and product owner, I’ve always wanted to embrace those values in our product language. We stand for a clearer and easier approach to access management. At the end of the day, we are changing plastic for bits, so it doesn’t get much simpler than that.

For this reason, as a team, we collectively took two steps back and honestly looked at our current brand image with a broader perspective. After we swallowed our pride, we delivered a brutal dose of honesty and admitted that we could do better than that. We were shipping amazing products, but our brand was not reflecting this freshness by any means. It felt abruptly detached from the company vision.

After this huge realization, we slept on the problem, and during the summer we gathered the whole team together in order to design an image that reflected the true spirit of the company. We wanted the involvement of every single person on the team. It didn’t matter their role or background; we wanted everyone to give their opinion and ideas so the final design contained a bit of every person on the team. We wanted each of us who looked up at our new image to instantly feel the connection, identify with it, and see his or her contribution in there. It had to be us. And I must say, it definitely is.