Seven loooong months in the making, a brand new Lucky Break was born today! I’m thoroughly exhausted, but so incredibly proud of this rebrand, this new site, and the thousands (!) of hours that it took to bring it to life. I hope you’ll grab a floor pillow, slip into your jammies and make yourself right at home…

 

Why rebrand only two years into a company? Why rebrand when I’d spent north of $40,000 (!) bringing the original brand to life? Especially when nothing was actually broken?

 

I realized early in 2014 that Lucky Break’s original brand identity was likely holding back the company. When the brand first launched in November 2012, I wanted the business to feel fun and approachable. A lot of beautiful, brilliantly talented souls faithfully created the visual original brand that I requested. But I woke up one day in February, punched up my website (as I do in the course of virtually every work day), and I suddenly saw it with fresh eyes.

 

The cutesy? It was too cute.

 

As adorable as it was, it didn’t communicate the caliber of work that I do. I had a good cry (or three) and tried to suppress the realization that a rebrand was likely on the horizon. I felt like someone had punched me in the gut.  A rebrand would mean rebuilding every stray bit of curriculum from the ground up. Reworking every PowerPoint slide. Redesigning hundreds of pages of handouts. Rerecording every curriculum video I’d ever made. Developing a whole new site. I wanted to throw up just thinking of all the work involved.

 

Undertaking this rebrand was a leap of faith.  Faith that rebranding was the right decision. Faith that the investment of time and money would be well-spent. Faith that you’d love it as much as I do. Faith that I’m doing the work I was born to do. Faith that my fantastically patient husband wouldn’t try to have me committed when I casually mentioned over dinner that I was going to level the company and start again. Faith that I could put the company on hold for a solid quarter (no blogs, no webinars, no newsletters, no speaking engagements) and you’d still be here to share this journey with me when I returned. And look… here we both are. I love that about you.

 

 

The realization haunted me throughout March. By April, I started whispering it to my team. Despite their initial shock, when I asked them to forget everything they knew about Lucky Break and to really look at our homepage with fresh eyes, honestly asking themselves if that site, that original brand identity, reflected the kind of transformative work we were doing with our clients, every one of them agreed it was time for a rebrand. Every. Single. One. That was all the confirmation I needed.

 

Have you ever known that you’d taken a misstep in business… perhaps a misstep with zeroes attached to the end? The kind that will take an anxiety-inducing amount of work to untangle? Yea, those. I’m convinced that the difference between ordinary companies and extraordinary companies are that the extraordinary companies plow through the change. They dispose of the excuses. They double-down the efforts. They invest the time. They find the resources. In my deepest core, I knew what we needed to do, so I allowed myself a singular day of mourning in May. And the next day, I woke up, and we started the rebrand.

 

Seven months later, the vision I had for Lucky Break is now complete. While I’ve always been incredibly proud of the work that we do, I can now say that I’m incredibly proud of what Lucky Break communicates to the world. Our outside matches our inside, and that feels damn good. Cry-inducing, deep-exhale, raise-a-toast, damn good. Not quite run-down-the-street-naked good, but really effing close.

 

 

 

A top-to-bottom rebrand of a digital company took so much more time, money, and energy than I ever anticipated, but I’m grateful to have a brilliant team who dug deep with me to pull off this project. Huge, wet, sloppy, inappropriate kisses on the cheeks of:

 

* Sharon McMullen of Ink & Mortar, who makes the prettiest damn brands I’ve ever seen. She created custom watercolors for us, explored 13 different logo concepts (God love her!), meticulously handlettered elements throughout the site, and never once complained about my OCD tendencies. Sharon, I cried at my desk when we flipped the switch on the new site today- thank you for bringing my vision for a decidedly swanky, grown-up Lucky Break to life.

 

* Padraic Ryan of Ryan Design Studio, who breathed life into Sharon’s design and waved his magic wand over the website. This is our fourth website together, and he knows to get another bottle of Irish Whiskey in the house whenever we’re in a launch week, because we work long and hard, but he never, ever gives up. That man custom coded our cart, built the most incredible Virtual Classroom and worked through three rounds of edits, tweaking hundreds of details each time. A finer web developer and better drinking partner you’ll never meet.

 

* Lucas Brown of Kickstand Studio, who’s responsible for the gorgeous photography throughout the new site. It’s so ridiculously amazing, in fact, that I worry that he’s set expectations too high. When you and I meet in person, promise not to say anything about my real-life forehead lines that Lucas graciously “softened” for the digital version of me, okay? He’s a honey of a man, a consummate professional, and he knows the magical pose that slims a woman’s tummy. If there’s any justice in the world, then that singular skill guarantees him entry into heaven.

 

* Melissa Wert of Print Therapy, who also happens to hold down a full-time gig as Lucky Break’s Operations Manager. She rebranded every single slide of curriculum (there are thousands), transcribed every word of every video I’ve ever recorded, talked me down from the mountain on days that I felt near the breaking point, and gave me stellar feedback every step of the way. The fact that we managed to get this site launched on time despite 4 solid months of intense, daily morning sickness is a testament to Melissa’s jaw-dropping work ethic. This would never have happened if it weren’t for you- thank you for helping me believe it was possible. Baby Wert owes you, big time.

 

* Jenn Lamb of Unurth, who also happens to be Lucky Break’s graphic designer. Jenn rebranded hundreds of pages of curriculum handouts, created an insane amount of social media graphics and cheered us on as we went. Thank you for allowing me to push you and thanks, too, for the late nights. It wasn’t uncommon for me to wake up and pour some chai tea, sitting down to my desk at 7am on the east coast, to realize that Jenn had delivered files only an hour before, working through the night on the west coast. You’re long overdue for a nap, but you know that we never rest for long around here!

 

I hope you love the new look as much as I do. And please- for the love of God- ask me for my business card when you see me. They’re so delicious that I’m dying to pass those suckers out.

 

Stay tuned: we’re just getting started, and the amount of goodness we’re unleashing this year to support makers and creatives is a little dizzying. I’ll be blogging about the rebrand all month, giving you an inside peek at the process of honing in on the visual identity we wanted, developing the logo and style elements, planning the photo shoots and pulling it all together for this website.

 

I’m excited to share the journey with you! Thank you for being here… it makes my heart happy.

 

I’d love to hear what you think of the rebrand.  And if you’ve made a big business boo-boo, then I hope you’ll pop a comment below to share your misstep and how you corrected the course. Onward and upward, my friends!