It takes a village to raise a brand.
Over the past few months, I have been redesigning the Richer Solutions brand, I am a creative person that has had the joy of working on some massive brands throughout my career – and I can confirm it’s damn hard work recreating your own brand! In a few weeks’ time, I will share with you the final look and feel of the Richer Solutions brand and the new website on March 15th. I can’t wait for this!!!
In the autumn of 2022, I ran a brand audit with several friends in the marketing industry, all from different backgrounds and experiences, a designer, a media guru, and a client-side marketing manager, thoughts were that I had outgrown my initial design from 2020. Additional feedback backed up the initial research it was time for a change.
Working with the Wenta organisation I received some invaluable coaching and successfully applied for a grant for the rebranding project. I matched this grant with an investment into the business and started to build towards a new brand that fits Richer Solutions, in the next few weeks, this will be launched.
I wrote a piece on Linkedin all about how to build your brand, over the course of several weeks I re-looked at all the pillars that made up Richer Solutions, and I spoke to some of my brilliant clients who provided testimonials and opinions that helped form the research for the rebuild. With the foundations in place, it was time to find a designer to help bring this to life and to drive me forward.
I have been privileged all my career to work with the best designers, those creative geniuses that bring thinking and ideas to life. For me great designers have thinking not surface patterns, I learned this concept from Mike Ratcliffe and I am grateful for everything he taught me. When choosing a designer, you need to find an agency or designer that is going to make your brand come to life, make you better, drive you forward and connect with your clients. If you achieve this you then need to give them the creative freedom to allow them to be brilliant, you need to share with them your research, you’re thinking, and the direction of travel. To get the best from them you need to listen, challenge and work with them – these are the minds that raise your brand from an idea to reality. I found the very talented Brandon Wilson – someone who is about thinking, great design, and bringing out my personality in the Richer Solutions brand.
To help with branding, websites, content, and marketing, for me you need great photography. A picture tells a thousand words. What is interesting is that you can take pictures yourself, lots of us have amazing cameras on our smartphones, it is a tactic lots of us use.
I always want to use the best, the photographer that knows how to bring the best out of a product or a person – I worked with the best Eugenio Franchi. He helped create situations to make the personality pop off the picture and help tell the story. Experience, tools, and setting are all helpful but for me, talent is the difference between a good and a great picture. I posted a couple of behind the scene pics – the final pictures look even better.
I have worked with superb copywriters, individuals that can use words to craft a feeling, an emotion, to bring a brand to life, it’s a skill that often goes unnoticed a credit to the best writers. As part of the process of recreating the Richer Solutions brand and website, I found a superb copywriter Annastasia Ward. in fact, she should be known as a wordsmith as she has bought my personality to life in written form. Her words bring out my personality on the website – she has captured everything I want to encapsulate in word form and more.
The final element of building a brand is your community, this means you, your reactions, how you share it, and how you talk about it – it makes a real difference. So much of Richer Solutions success has come from referrals and recommendations, my community has helped build the business.
After all, it takes a village to raise a brand, so make sure the village you have is awesome, and work with great people who can elevate you and the brand. In a few weeks’ time, I will share with you the new look and feel of the brand, and I am grateful to the brilliant people that have helped re-create it – my brands village.