If you've visited thescribes.co over the past year, and again over past few days, you would have noticed some significant changes to our website and product line.
This week, I (Mike) sat down with Alden to discuss some of these changes, and we figured we'd let you all in on how we think about our brand. For some context, I focus more on 'the business' of The Scribes, while Alden is the leader of our creative efforts.
Here are some of the takeaways from our conversation:
Simplicity is key.
After staring at a website and products for a year straight, you start to ask the question of 'Does what we are doing make sense to someone who has never seen our brand before?' Unfortunately, the answer we landed on was no. Prior to re-branding, each one of our journals had a different and unique name that was clear and meaningful to us, but not always clear to someone who wasn't familiar with our brand. Our journal names were The Crosby (the cross-street in NYC where we started the business), The Original (our first product), The Essential (alluding to the pandemic world), and The Moxie (to symbolize female empowerment).
Customers (and potential customers) didn't always understand these naming conventions, so we dropped it altogether, and re-branded our line of journals to focus on the actual attributes: Soft-cover and Hard-cover.
The use of color.
When I asked Alden how he landed on the colors of our products and the primary colors on our website, he said that the Maroon, Emerald Green, Navy, and Charcoal represented the practicality of our products.
At the same time, however, he still wanted to have fun with the brand, and that's why you'll see big pops of color on our website, on the sleeves of the journal when you receive them, and in the content we use on social media. He said, "we want to be more fun, more 'techy,' and less Moleskine.'' (sorry Moleskine)
Alden has also been really into the use of hand-written arrows and pieces of copy, used in digital form, as a way to have fun with the brand and explain specific product attributes. After all, we are a hand-written company.
Looking forward - what can you expect from us?
When I asked Alden what the future of our brand looks like in his mind, he actually seemed pretty happy about the place we were in now, and wants to focus more on the shopping experience, as opposed to sweeping new visual changes. How you toggle between products, how you select your preferred page type, and how you add to your cart - that's where he wants to focus going forward.
Alden reiterated with "I think we have a good foundation to build upon. Now, it's about making small iterations to improve the customer experience."
If you have feedback on our updated product line and/or web-design, we'd love to hear it!