How does an early stage startup effectively appear and communicate in a market where beauty is king?
Startups benefit immensely by signaling credibility through a solid brand and marketing strategy. But doing so requires talent and expertise typically unavailable to early stage founders. For Illume, a well-developed brand strategy would show the wellness industry that they belonged.
By elevating the product's position from an analytics tool to an industry-specific insights platform, and by developing a name and brand strategy that accurately reflected the values of the market, we helped Illume launch and go to market with confidence.
The original name, InsightX, was pointed, direct, and outcome-oriented. It said "use the product to review your analytics and receive insights as a result." InsightX could therefore be applied to any industry - a relatively weak position that signaled transactional outcomes over true value. The name was lost in online searches and wasn’t ownable. And lastly, given the wellness industry space and consumers that would be utilizing the product, the name didn’t come across as luxurious or desirable and felt like an afterthought.
As we set out to develop a new name, we set guidelines to make sure it was easy to remember, read, and generally felt pleasant to say. Then, we made sure it alluded to the feeling you would get while using the product. Various ideas came to us, such as considering a name based off a luxurious travel location, or a city or town that exemplified the customized, almost bespoke approach to analytics. We landed on Illume to signify the warmth and reasoning behind illuminating insights that would enhance a medspa, while also meaning “to educate” - leading people towards the brand direction that became “highlighting the beauty in data.”
How do we show beauty in the aesthetics space without highlighting people and subjecting ourselves to depicting “beautiful” people? That would be very subjective and opens up the brand to easy criticism and bias. We leaned into floral imagery, specifically painted florals, in order to show the contrast between man-made beauty and natural and organic beauty. By using the floral imagery in layers, we were able to convey the combination of data and imagery: the bottom layer is pixelated through bitmaps (to show the underlying data) and the top layers show the painted floral imagery (to depict illumination and a reveal of that data). Secondary imagery utilizes the palette through a gradient system that has high contrast and blends into the deep backgrounds to further depict illumination in places where the floral imagery would be too distracting or overwhelming for a composition.
The palette was inspired by a combination of what was resonating in the medspa space, while pulling in accents and natural colors from the floral imagery. Both take into account contrasts and colors that felt deep, soft, and paired easily together.
The font (SLTF ARCILLA) is a versatile font that can be used for more formal applications when in sentence case, but changes entirely when all caps to use for more social and expressive applications through abundant ligatures and flourishes. Redaction 35 was included in the font palette to highlight important callouts to data and analytics, since it offers a great amount of contrast by being a very squared off, pixelated, serif font - a direct tie to the underlying imagery of the pixel floral that is used as backgrounds throughout the brands.
The logo mark is a mix of gridlines, a source of light, and organic ink traps that smooth out the line transitions. The same system is applied to the icons that allows for intricate depictions that lean equal parts rigid and organic.
Prior to working with Five Four, Illume's website was similar to the name InsightX - outcome oriented with transactional, "here's what you can do" messaging that prioritized features over value. It wasn't clear what the product did, who it was for, or why it mattered.
By extracting the details from the founder and CTO, we were able to organize features into three simple groups: integrations, templates, and the chat function. From there, we identified the most popular templates that would resonate with the market and apply to most all use cases. This allowed us to create a value-driven home page and then push all the specific product features to a platform page, effectively elevating the product to seem more like a growing platform than a one-time use tool.
To create a pricing page we worked with the founder to create pricing tiers based on existing sales and customer feedback. This led to Illume Lite, Illume Business, and Illume Tailored - each focused on the number of integrations required.
Lastly, it was important that we brought the brand into the website in delightful ways. A spotlight feature on the homepage hero creates that delight without distracting, and highlighted the product value - that Illume is here to illuminate the beauty and growth opportunities hidden in your data.
When Illume came to us, they had not yet publicly launched. The founder, Ben Wolber, was out there selling, but he had no marketing activity to bring awareness or generate warm leads. After the strategic name and brand change, and the company's succesfully raised pre-seed round, it became clear that now was the time to tell the world about what Ben is up to.
A brand launch can be an incredibly strategic, growth-oriented opportunity for any early stage startup. Our playbook for a great brand launch includes far more than simply a LinkedIn post from the founder. We worked with Ben's advisors and stakeholders to utilize their social following to enhance the day-of launch promotion, which generated more traffic to his social accounts that had limited followers. A press release sent via BusinessWire caught the attention of the Cincinnati Business Courrier, resulting in an interview and article, along with traffic to Illume's new website.
As Illume's marketing partner, we wanted to utilize the newly obtained audience from the brand launch and generate awareness of the events, partnerships, new hires, and general activity that explained what Illume does and why it matters.
From highlighting Illume's advisors, promoting speaking engagements, and sharing quotes from satisfied customers, we created a content calendar that took into account all of Illume's activity, organized it, wrote content and created graphics that generated attention and interest.
Illume found success in attending trade shows, and one was on the heels of the brand launch. For AmSpa, the American Med Spa Association's annual conference, we designed a booth that would be attractive enough to bring in attendees, informative enough to explain what Illume does, and included takeaway items like stickers that allowed attendees to have a piece of the beautiful brand for themselves.
For Illume's first conference, we wanted attendees to interact with the brand and take a piece of it home. But for early stage startups, budget for seemingly endless swag purchases is not a good use of funds.
Stickers fill the gap by being affordable and full of brand expression. Attendees can see themselves in the messaging and literally wear it on their water bottles and notebooks - which keeps the Illume brand top of mind.
