How to rebrand: The Wildings Studio creation story #1
Why a successful business rebrand should always start with a compelling creation story
This is the transcript from an IGTV in which Rachael revisits the creation story of Wildings Studio (which started out as The Apple Yard), and why this is important for any business and when rebranding.
Find out with Rachael what made us set up Wildings as a brand studio and what led us to choose the name...
We are a brand studio based in Torquay, South Devon, offering branding, website design & brand video to creative businesses across the UK - find out more about our branding services for businesses.
Introduction
Good morning, I thought I would do my first in our series of videos and posts on our rebrand journey.
Thank you so much for your comments and your likes and your interest in that the other day.
So at the start of any project we first of all start by asking how did you get to where you are today. What's your story? What's your brand story and who are you as business owners?
The origin story is fundamental
So I'm just going to share a little bit about us and how we got to where we are today yeah, so grab a cup of tea and listen in.
So we formally started our business in 2019. Up until that point we'd been both working part time and other jobs.
And really it was over a number of years that the business evolved to get to the point where we had enough revenue that we could start both doing that full time.
Obviously we have a family and we had other jobs, sort of alongside what we were doing before we could make the financial leap to running the business for ourselves.
But I wanted to just rewind and explain a little bit about how we got to where we are and the things that make us who we are as people.
Rachael’s architecture & theatre inspirations
So when I was 16 I did a placement in a graphic design studio where I first learned how to use Photoshop. Until then, Microsoft Paint was my friend, and so that was really eye opening for me to be able to manipulate images and get the computer to do interesting things.
Yeah, so this is in the days before social media - the Internet was early days; CD ROMs with Encarta explorer were all the rage.
And I loved painting and I love drawing and I wasn't really into computers, but I found the placement really, really interesting and helpful.
And then as a degree, I decided to study architecture. I wanted to go into theatre design and set production. And I thought architecture would be a good way to go about getting into that industry.
So I did a degree Oxford Brookes University in architecture and I haven't ever practiced architecture. But there's kind of skills and things like that that I learned there that are really, really helpful and helped me today.
Some of those things would be receiving a brief and really asking a lot of questions and trying to really understand what the client wants.
What do they mean when they say specific things and trying to more understand? The pain points or the reasons behind the things that they've said. Because often people will kind of in their mind. Assume that the solution is X, but actually it could be Y.
So it's understanding why those things are important to the client. Being really creative and just exploring things and trying to really delve into things and just see where things take you on a creative journey.
And psychology is a huge part of architecture and really understanding the physical space and also light and colour and how that affects us.
And those are things I use within my design specifically: colour psychology and really understanding how colours affect stuff and why things impact us in the way that they do.
Obviously also the skill set like CAD design and other kind of Illustrator and InDesign and using all of those different software programs.
And so that's kind of where I come.
Mythology & mountaineering inspire Simon
I met Simon while I was at uni. He was at Oxford University studying Classics. And for him, his degree was all about delving into history.
In the last 2000 years and understanding Latin, Classical Arabic and Classical Greek, as well and really understanding stories and how cultures have evolved to tell those stories.
And after university we got married and we had children and we decided that we were going to set up a business in North Africa in the tourism industry.
Simon was really interested in outdoor pursuits and did lots of outdoor pursuits, qualifications and we decided we were going to set up an outdoor pursuits company. So I did all the branding for this business that got set up.
Discovering how we could solve people’s problems
And we wanted to work in Morocco, and while we were doing that and setting up the business, I was approached by some friends to start doing some design work.
They'd seen some of the stuff I was doing, and so asked, could you do that for us? So I started to pick up clients alongside everything else that I was doing whilst being a mum.
And actually we ended up coming back to the UK for a whole host of different reasons, and when we landed back in the UK it was my design work that we're sustaining and supporting our family while Simon tried to get a job and he ended up working as a consultant for some charities.
And alongside all of that I was doing some short courses at the University of Arts. I'm really just trying to get my skills up to scratch, and so I had a whole host of really interesting jobs and that included some product design and surface design for things that sold in shops, some branding for various businesses, exhibition design, illustration - you name it.
I kind of had to go with lots and lots of different things and as kind of the kids started going more into school.
I had a little bit more time and we started to develop our offering and I didn't really think that I wanted to kind of do that. Really what I wanted was for the kids to be old enough to go into schools so that I could have full-time job working.
But somebody had said to us right at the start of our journey into having our business abroad that they could see us with a marketing and design agency in about 10 years.
And we thought no, no, no, that that wouldn't happen, but that that kind of statement never left Simon and as we were doing more and more in terms of communications and design work for different organisations.
I was more during the design so I was doing more of the communication and marketing consultancy work. We thought oh, could we actually?
Do it more formally together. Could we start to explore that.
How we chose our initial business name
And so that's kind of how we got going, and we called our business The Apple Yard initially because at that time we had a garden, a very tiny little garden, and it was full of apple trees and our surname, being Cox, we felt like The Apple Yard kind of summarised where we are and we were doing things like smaller little bits of work.
But now we've kind of got to a point where we feel like our name, although we really love it, it doesn't hugely reflect where we draw inspiration from.
And really, a sense of more of the kind of work that we would like to do.
There are some other reasons as well why we need to change our name, but it feels like the right moment - as we've kind of both quit our other jobs and gone full time in for our business - to really decide who we want to be as a business, who we want to be as a brand and to pivot ourselves now.
And to be able to adapt and to change and to really come, I guess, reflect more of who we are today.
Being open to change
So we offer branding; we offer website design; we offer video work as well, and through all of that we want to really be strategic and really serve our clients well, whatever their budget might be and really help them discover all that they are meant to be and to do, and to really support and ask questions along the way.
So we want our brand to be more reflective of that and to explore; and not be hemmed in so much in a small space, but to be bigger.
So I hope that that helps you understand a little bit about our back story; some of our skills and things like that that we've kind of picked up along the way, as we've honed our craft and learned things as we've gone and.
I hope that that fills in some of the gaps about who we are and where we want to get to.
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