case study
Rethinking Optoro’s brand identity to reposition an evolving product
Optoro started in 2008 as a retail liquidator and by 2010 grew into a reverse logistics company focused on retail operations, warehousing, transportation, and processing returned and excess inventory from large retailers. By 2018, the company had developed AI-driven warehouse software, growing into an enterprise SaaS company with large omnichannel retail customers like Best Buy, Gap, and Target.
They needed an updated brand identity to shepherd this repositioning to the market to continue to fuel the company’s growth.
Optoro had worked with an agency to execute a rebrand in 2016 but had never dedicated any resources to maintaining the brand after the initial launch until I joined in 2019. There was a huge opportunity to not only give the brand a facelift but to educate, build advocacy, and shepherd in a new era of consistency and visual storytelling.
The biggest challenge in creating this? Creating an identity that is visually interesting and speaks to our audience, but is simple enough for non-designers to create consistent brand content independently.
the before
Below are examples of marketing assets created by marketers and freelancers using the brand guidelines from 2016.
my role
I partnered with one junior designer for the initial stages of this project but executed the majority of the work on my own. Optoro’s Corporate and Product Marketing teams were my closest collaborators, offering feedback and suggestions throughout the process.
creative direction
project management
design execution
workshop facilitation
workshops & prioritization
I started the process by hosting a series of workshops to align on goals and start to build trust and brand advocacy with the marketing team who, at the time, didn’t see brand as anything beyond a logo and design elements.
After completing a brand audit, we identified our greatest opportunities for improvement and set the plan in motion.
Typography — improving legibility and hierarchy without changing the brand typeface
Color Palette — make the brand feel less industrial, create a more diverse palette
Photography — need a library of approved assets, bring in more elements of human connection
Deck Template — reduce time spent on deck creation
Resource accessibility — reduce time spent on deck creation, improve visual storytelling
To develop a deeper understanding of the connection between Optoro’s brand attributes, personality, and visual identity, I hosted a Visual Brand Eploration workshop. I developed and presented mood boards of different design styles, which participants put stickers on to identify visual elements and styles that best represented the individual brand attributes. This activity gave us something concrete and easy to reference so that we could have meaningful, objective conversations about the brand.
design exploration
We started exploring new design executions using Optoro’s introductory sales pitch deck as the reference point. By using existing pieces of content to explore design choices, we were able to explore and understand the usage of elements and how they would all fit together when creating a new system.
Using the pitch deck, we explored colors, layouts, type treatments and styles, graphic elements, and image styles and ultimately landed on a vision that marketing, design, and leadership were aligned on.
While it’s always fun to explore a lot of innovative options, we knew that our biggest challenge would be finding a balance between creating a system that the design team could use and how non-designers could use the same (or similar) elements using only Google Slides and Docs.
design details & decisions
typography
My goal was to improve legibility and hierarchy without changing the brand typeface (Proxima Nova) since the company had already invested significant money in licensing it.
I explored shifting away from using all-caps text, which Optoro had been using (and abusing). To quote one of our account reps, “It looks like we are shouting all the time!”
I focused on how we could use bolder weights, tracking variations, and size in headings to build hierarchy and offer flexibility for the future.
color palette
In order to move away from “industrial” and achieve the “tech company” vibe we wanted, I reduced the use of dark, graphite backgrounds, which were overpowering and heavy. Moving toward light and bright visuals was also a helpful indicator to the market that Optoro was moving into the software space.
I pulled inspiration from brands like Google (of course), Stripe, Loop Returns, Happy Returns, Affirm, and Wealthsimple to see how they used color to tell a story and even delineate between products.
before
after
icons & graphics
While working on this, one of the tasks that arose was a request to create a singular graphic to illustrate the new product positioning — particularly for our website and sales conversations. Building on the iconography style and the style of illustrations that freelancers had done in the past, I introduced custom, Optoro-specific graphics for more effective storytelling.
Optoro had a clear style for iconography and a pretty robust library when I started working on this project, and icons were primarily used for diagrams, illustrating product flows, and illustrating high-level value. They simply needed to be made accessible.
Rather than reinventing the wheel, I continued to build on this library and make it easier to use. I’ve more recently added complimentary icon treatments that help enhance standard imagery to tell a story, use more color, and add more visual interest.
graphic explorations
solution diagram — before
solution diagram — after
photography
Optoro’s existing photography style guides aligned with my vision for the brand — their biggest roadblock was that no one knew what to look for or where to get images.
I was limited to sourcing images from Adobe Stock and building custom graphics from product prototypes, so I started collecting and editing what images I could fit into these categories to get us started.
What to look for:
Real, diverse people
Natural, candid, and spontaneous (movement)
Shallow depth of field and perspective
Well-lit background with a warm tone
Include green, natural elements when possible
Avoid clichés and stereotypes
Imagery Themes / Categories:
Optoro (employees, our products, our facilities)
Shoppers (purchasing, returning, happy, unhappy, ecommerce shopping, in-store shopping)
Retailers (warehouses, stores, operations, employees accepting returns)
Sustainability (donations, refurbishment, recommerce and resale)
graphic elements
When thinking about graphic elements and illustrations, I knew I wanted to focus on three key themes: sustainability, movement, and connection. I kept these elements simple at the beginning, knowing a gradual approach would cause less friction among employees and be more widely accepted.
I chose two simple elements to start with: circles and lines. Circles tied back to the company’s focus on circularity and the 3 Os in the company name/logo. More practically, they were great for cropping images, encasing icons, and even drawing attention to a specific part of an image. Lines are deceptively simple and incredibly versatile — they can be used to help draw attention, emphasize, and connect elements to tell a story.
Interested in how it all came together?
launch
While the dream state for a brand rollout is that everything is polished and beautiful and ready to launch all together, this one was, candidly, a bit all over the place due to an unexpected shift in priorities. I like to call it a phased approach ;)
The external rollout was moved up significantly due to needing a new website to launch new product partnership, being announced in March of 2020. As we were prepping to launch the site, tornados in Nashville, TN destroyed our warehouse facility, followed by COVID-19 shutting the world down the week after. Needless to say, the Optoro brand was not high on our priority list.
While I continued to design using the new brand for external marketing materials, the refreshed brand wasn’t fully released internally until July of that year when I launched the new document templates and resource libraries.
outcomes
The external impact of this brand refresh has been slow and steady, but growing consistently, due to a number of factors. Changing the market’s perception of a brand doesn’t happen overnight and the company has changed product positioning and target audiences multiple times since the completion of this work, making the change in brand perception tricky to measure. Factoring in the booming return rates due to the COVID-19 ecommerce surge, the number of competitors in the returns technology space has skyrocketed.
However, the relationships I created and nurtured through this process have had the most lasting impact on the Optoro brand — the truest definition of “playing the long game”. The trust I built across the organization has completely changed how marketing at Optoro operates, shifting from a field marketing-only model with limited digital efforts to a more sustainable content marketing strategy with thorough, multi-touch campaigns. I’ve been able to drive improvement efforts like developing a content strategy and planning documentation, campaign plans and briefs, hosting creative brainstorms, and more that have improved alignment and collaboration between marketing, sales, and leadership.
This overall influence has had the greatest lasting impact on the quality and strategy of the work we are putting out into the market, which has, naturally, had an overwhelmingly positive impact on the perception of the brand.