The Yalo rebrand: How a new way to tell our stories is taking us to the next level

Ari Maerina

October 17, 2022

A rebrand is more than a new look.

Contrary to popular belief, a brand is not a just a logo. A brand combines all tangible and intangible elements representing an organization or company. Without a brand, a logo wouldn't have real meaning; it would simply be a graphic. Conference rooms, living rooms, coffee shops — customer interactions happen everywhere these days! What hasn’t changed is our grit, hard work, tenacity, and our endless pursuit to level up our teams and customers. Our goal was to create a system of interconnected elements that represent our customers and employees all over the world, our awesome product platform, and how our company looks, feels, and acts. This would be the foundation for the new consistent, unified, and recognizable Yalo brand persona. Here is how we went about our rebrand and our thought process on why we needed to evolve to match our new goals as a company.

1. Logo re-design

Then: The decision to pursue a rebrand started with an itch and idea to redesign our logo. Then: the original Yalo logo worked well for us during our earlier stages. As we grew, we felt we wanted to better embody our value of “Keep it Simple” by creating visual story that could bring us onto the next stage.

Now: The new fully custom word mark is sans serif that embodies our dedication to real conversations and keeping things simple. Conversational commerce is at the core of our product and we wanted to show that off in our logo with a chat logomark.

2. Illustration

Then: The style and animation proved difficult to scale and replicate for a lot of our project timelines. While beautiful, we found the illustrations to be common in our industry, and it was difficult to create assets continuously without a full-time illustrator. Also, our brand guidelines lacked direction, which created an unrefined feeling across placements.

Now: The use of larger shapes, textures and lines, more strategic usage guidelines, and the elimination of full body illustrated characters make our system more scalable, and allow it to play a supporting role in boosting photography or product images, instead of stealing the show.

3. Brand colors

Then: Our previous palette consisted of blue and purple hues along with touches of gray and black. After four years of monochrome styles, it’s not a surprise that the graphics tended to be repetitive. There also weren’t guides on how to use the color and working within such a limited palette made pushing and evolving the brand difficult.

Now: We’ve made a bold move to create a palette that is bright, accessible, and that represents our diverse Yaleres around the world as well as our wonderful customers. After conducting research with our employees and external partners, we’ve created a more cohesive palette, ensuring that the colors easily work together. We’ve also ensured that they translate well into your products/ platform.

4. Typography

Then: Our font was a good sans serif, but it lacked personality or hierarchy. It felt like every other font we’ve seen in tech.

Now: As a team, we unanimously voted that Tomato Grotesk would be our new brand font. Inspired by a tomato cut in half, Andrea Biggio’s typeface comes in 18 styles and nine different weights and we felt this was the perfect font style to show Yalo’s personality, design forward thinking, and innovative spirit.

5. Product

Then: Our product imagery focused on the end user in our B-2-C-2-C pipeline. Usually showing only the consumer’s messages or interactions with our product. This unfortunately created confusion on the full value of our platform and capabilities.

Now: We’ve created visual product mock-ups that not only focus on our conversational commerce magic, but also imagery that pulls back the curtain to show the actual platform in action. This transparency aligns with our values of caring, simplicity, and making it happen.

We may be a small team, but we’re mighty!

Doing a rebrand fully in-house is no easy task and a brand is never really “done”. This large project which began this past January, has been an opportunity to rethink some core aspects of Yalo’s values, communication and visual story. It’s been hard work and fun at the same time! A lot like our Yaleres and our culture. The path forward after this rebrand will be testing to see what works best and what doesn’t. Design at Yalo will continue to iterate it and adapt the new brand as we continue to grow and evolve. We were able to succeed with our super talented brand, product, and content designers as well as our design research and marketing teams! I’d like to credit the brand designers for making it happen. We ultimately had to prep for two launches—first, an interim rebrand that brought in new colors and fonts, and finally the full rebrand that included brand activation assets for internal and external brand experiences. Our team has made this nearly year-long passion not only a reality, but also a success.

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