When Your Brand Just Needs a Little Freshening Up

It was 2004 and I was about to launch the website that would change my life.

I didn’t know it yet, but my newly launched idea was going to grow some serious legs and would ultimately change the lives of millions of others as well.

The idea was simple — a real estate community and resource directory to help people (namely me) learn the business without getting the run around from the real estate gurus.

Since I was getting into real estate, my company had to have a logo that said REAL ESTATE, right?

I quickly realized that our ‘brand’ was a dime a dozen — like every other real estate website, I know had a house as part of our logo.

There was nothing distinct about us; nothing memorable.

I wanted a logo something that people would immediately identify with what we stood for and set out to design our new mark. The idea was to have a guy coming out of a pocket . . . someone who was gunning for financial freedom thanks to the knowledge we imparted on them.

The resulting logo did just what I wanted it to do.

It was visually pleasing.

It was memorable.

It had some meaning behind it.

For the next decade, our beloved ‘pocket guy’ represented BiggerPockets and helped us to become the company that I always hoped we could be.

Meanwhile . . .

Over that same period, our site had been redesigned several times to stay fresh and relevant. Our audience grew dramatically and our core mission began to develop.

We were no longer that little forum with a few thousand real estate investors. We were becoming a vibrant, organic community that today counts over 400,000 members and sees close to 2,000 new forum posts and countless other actions between our users each day.

BiggerPockets had grown up, but our logo and site’s look and feel had begun to feel like a relic of the past.

Time to Freshen Up the Brand!

We set out to bring on a new member of the team to take the lead in the redevelopment of the look, feel, and user interface of BiggerPockets and hired an unbelievably talented UI/UX Designer, Joshua Tilton. Together, we decided to start with a new, clean logo, and worked on creating a more modern and obvious site navigation.

I’d love to go into the details and iterations of how we came to our new design/logo, but Josh (JT as we call him) is excited to share that with you in a post of his own.

The process was very cumbersome and we worked incredibly hard with our entire team to come up with something that we felt better represented who we were today.

The resulting logo, which you see across BiggerPockets today is something that I’m extremely proud of, and which I know will help to represent us for the next decade (and perhaps beyond). It still includes our beloved ‘logo man’ but most importantly, incorporates the community that has made BiggerPockets the leading destination online for real estate investors and others in the industry.

At the end of the day, it is important to regularly re-evaluate your company, its goals, values and mission, and to make sure your brand adequately represents it for today and tomorrow.

Does your brand need a little freshening up too?

Note By BiggerPockets: These are opinions written by the author and do not necessarily represent the opinions of BiggerPockets.