How We Refreshed the Matrak Brand

If you’ve explored our website lately, you may have noticed a few changes here and there. New colours. New icons. New fonts. New copy. As Matrak has grown to support construction companies on over 250+ projects, we felt the old branding felt outdated and not reflective of our company’s growth.

So, our marketing team banded together and took on the mammoth task of doing a brand refresh. Note that this wasn’t a complete rebrand, more of a makeover if you will. 

In this blog post, we’re going to unpack step-by-step just how we conceptualised and executed this brand refresh.

Before experimenting with new colour palettes, icons, and web designs, we started with an in-depth session to get everyone on the same page. We discussed our goals for the brand refresh, end goal and unpacked why we felt this task was important. 

This discussion between marketing and the leadership team was essential because you can’t come up with a brand refresh every year or two. So if we’re making this investment, we need to think long-term about the company’s growth and brand.

From there, we created a proposed timeline (with some flexibility, because in the startup world, things always change!) that mapped the beginning, middle and end of the project, as well as expectations in each phase. This gave a clear idea on:

We confirmed that this would be a 3-month project, with an aim to launch in early 2022.

The research phase was deep dive in every sense of the word. We created moodboards of brands we loved and resonated with, competitor research and imagery inspiration that we wished to adopt in the brand refresh.

However, the most valuable part of our research came directly from our coworkers. The marketing team interviewed everyone in the company, from leadership, UX, web development to customer success. We wanted to make sure everyone felt heard and understood in this creative process. We asked them about their visions for the brand as it grows, what they liked in the old branding and what they would like to see in the new branding. 

From there, we compiled the research together and produced a creative brief that would provide further direction to the brand refresh and new tone of voice.

Based on our research, it made sense to split the brand refresh into two main categories:

Our team also discussed the best way to launch this initiative to the rest of the company once it’s been finalised. Brand refreshes can be overwhelming both for our internal team members and our customers, so the last thing we wanted to do was blast this all out in one go. Change is always scary, so it’s best to be eased into it.

Therefore, we decided to launch it in little phases. We would start with pages like our Resources page, updating icons as new content was produced. That would expand into other pages and our email marketing campaigns, then making its way into fonts, colour palettes and new messaging, eventually coming together and being updated on our website’s homepage. 

To optimise collaboration and transparency, our digital toolkit included Slack, Trello, Google Drive and Adobe Pro. 

The feedback was either done through ‘sticky notes’ directly annotated on PDF files, particularly for design. Whereas, feedback were direct comments on Google docs for our new Tone of Voice drafts.

Everything from our Google Docs to Trello card were visible to the marketing and leadership team, ensuring feedback was easy to communicate. We also set time periods where the feedback process would open and close to ensure we wouldn’t be inundated with several opinions at once. It’s important to set these boundaries to keep the project on timeline.

Design. Write. Re-design. Re-write. Discuss the feedback. More re-designs. More re-writing. More feedback. Our marketing team got to work and did it all.

Prior to presenting it to the whole company, the marketing team did an internal presentation to the founders and leadership team. We combined the brand’s new tone and design reveal and how it correlated with Matrak’s growth and future.

It was paramount for us to explain our creative process and tell a high-level story behind the brand refresh, rather than simply presenting new icons, colours, fonts and messaging. Everything we had created – from the icons to the copy tone of voice – had to have a purpose to it, becoming another piece of the important puzzle that made up Matrak’s brand identity.

We’re excited about what we’ve produced, and we hope you like it! You can see the change throughout our website, especially on our homepage. Below are also some screenshots of our new branding and tone of voice guidelines.

Matrak was founded in 2017 and provides innovative mobile-first end-to-end supply chain tracking software solutions to the construction industry. We believe in the significant benefits to Site Managers, contractors, developers and construction supply chains generated from data-driven insights through the materials tracking process.

Industry-wide challenges are best solved through collaboration, and Matrak’s material tracking app strives to bring the construction industry together around its most fundamental component – materials.

Our app is available on all iOS, Android and Windows devices and has helped more than 157 projects in over 5 countries to enable the power of supply chain transparency.

Book a demo to learn more today.