BuildGroup’s Brand Refresh

You might have noticed that the BuildGroup website, LinkedIn, and blog are looking a little different. Earlier this year, we embarked on a rebranding exercise, inspired by our founder and investor community. 

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As investors and partners to early growth stage SaaS companies, we recognize that a clear, consistent brand strategy is a critical piece of the puzzle for building trust, credibility, and customer loyalty, especially for companies at this stage. One of the most impactful things founders can do is build a great brand for their company. While branding can at times seem intangible, it can make a huge difference in attracting the right talent and investors, communicating core company values, and preparing to scale. 

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Of course, we wanted to make sure we were walking the walk with our own brand. It was important for us to make sure that our visual identity, online tone, and style of content creation match the way we move about the world of VC and early growth stage investing. Our re-brand is a reflection of the kind of partner we see ourselves as (and often get told that we are). In this blog post, we share our process and dive deeper into how we made our design and content decisions.

The process of the BuildGroup rebrand

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There are many ways of tackling a re-branding assignment. We wanted to make ours as simple as possible, while making sure we didn’t cut any corners.

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• Audit: We conducted a thorough brand and content audit with the help of a brand and content marketing expert. We reviewed our previous branding, content, website copy, blog copy and more. 
• Discovery: We went on an internal discovery journey: we asked our employees, stakeholders, and portfolio company leaders to tell us about their experiences working with us. We wanted to know what they thought about our brand’s current presentation and personality, and how they see it. We thought about what makes us unique, why founders and investors like working with us, and how that could come across in the way we talk about ourselves in our online and offline materials.  
• Moodboarding: We had an extensive moodboarding process based on our audit and research. We turned discovery findings into brand direction, and took our time to research and evaluate fonts, colors, and image inspirations. From the beginning, we knew that our Austin origins were going to be important to our identity. We Intentionally thought about how to reflect Austin in our brand, and ultimately convey it through our tone and color palette. 

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Let’s dive a bit deeper on each below. 

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The audit and discovery processes

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Internal research always sounds easier than it is. It’s easy to assume that we know everything about our brand and therefore can run through this part quickly. However, in our years of business experience, we’ve learned that this is arguably the most important part of a rebrand process. When you’re part of a tight knit firm like ours, every voice counts. We had an external researcher come in to interview our team members and advisors to ensure a neutral approach to our research. 

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Here are some of the quotes that came up during the discovery process that motivated our ultimate outcome: 

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• “You get a sense that the partners love doing this. This is what gets them up in the morning, thinking through how to help the founders. It’s not transactional. This isn’t just a job for them.”
• “We’re rolling up our sleeves and getting involved with creating a more valuable business. We have a long term orientation, and we do not force exists unless they make sense.”
• “Most people that work in investment firms just have MBAs and haven’t been on the operations side. We have empathy for the founding team. VC is broken; we have a different vision.” 
• “We love coaching, advising. We’re humans who help other humans. We’re results-oriented. We care about outcomes; we’re trained business people. We have the spine of results-orientation that holds things together.” 

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Moodboarding 

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Once we had our research in hand, we synthesized it into our brand’s attributes. The sentiment of the above sample quotes was summarized into a series of adjectives, which then helped us think through the visual elements that correlated to those. Some of those words were “collaborative”, “warm”, and “humble”. The adjectives also informed how we approached color and font brainstorming in our moodboarding process. 

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Here’s an example of one of our color ideations, with loud and clear Austin inspiration: 

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Taking these Austin inspired colors as a starting point we then worked to further refine this color palette into something that would work for many different mediums, from decks to print materials. Ultimately our color palette ended up looking like this: 
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Logo Design

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When it came to re-designing our new logo, we decided early on that we wanted to play with the concept of building blocks. We often play with “building blocks” as we help scale companies, and sometimes refer to our frameworks and standard processes as “building blocks”. We even decided to call our newsletter and blog Building Blocks, since these are pieces of content that come from our experience as company builders. 

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We were also particular about our font choices; we went for humanist fonts that felt comfortable and familiar, yet modern. 

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Our final logo is composed of modern building blocks that come together to look like the letter B. And, if you do a double-take, the logo looks like a person raising their arm – to us, this signals engagement, interaction, a willingness to roll up our sleeves and get to work.

Bringing it all together

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Now that we picked our colors, logo mark, and typography, it was time to bring it all together into the identity. In this next phase we mocked up a website, merch, and business cards to show how the brand’s elements come together holistically. You can see how the shapes from the logo echo across the website and printed materials.

Closing thoughts 

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At the end of the day, our rebrand is BuildGroup doubling down on who we believe we are - company builders and operators who prioritize genuine partnerships over transactions. It also represents our continued evolution as a different kind of venture firm. We’re proud of where we landed. Now, back to building. 

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For more Building Blocks, subscribe to our newsletter and follow us on LinkedIn. 

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The information in this blog post is provided in good faith without any warranty. It does not constitute investment advice, recommendation, or an offer of any services or products of BuildGroup Management and it is not intended to provide a sufficient basis on which to make an investment decision. This document is provided for educational purposes only. Discussions of current or former BuildGroup portfolio companies are intended for educational and discussion purposes only. Any portfolio company so discussed has been selected based on objective, non-performance based criteria.

This content does not constitute or form part of an offer of any investment advisory services of BuildGroup Management, LLC, nor does it constitute or form part of an offer to issue or sell, or of a solicitation of an offer to subscribe or buy, any securities or other financial instruments, nor does it constitute a financial promotion, investment advice or an inducement or incitement to participate in any product, offering or investment.

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