At the Beginning...

Digital Workroom started as a team of 4; writing code in a bid to put our crazy and innovative ideas to the App Store. We did that — but through the journey we learnt that just putting your product out in the wild was not enough. If you’ve ever made an app, you will know that getting your 1st download can unknowingly take days, or even weeks.

Luckily, there are plenty of ways nowadays to get yourself out there, but it requires different parts working together, such as marketing, data analysis, optimisation strategies and most importantly focused teams.

As with any kind of start-up, it’s challenging to do all these things right from the beginning, especially when there are endless choices of what you could do, but then your resources are limited. We understand the pain as for many just starting out; trying to find your focus in such a crowded and fast-moving industry is hard.

When we launched one of first successful innovations (Noted.), we quickly realised the need for a team of data experts to solely focus on understanding how our product was growing. There was no point spending valuable time building something we couldn’t measure the success of — and that is why now, we rely on them for almost every decision we make.

Knowing the key to unlock potential, we started offering this service to our clients, helping other brands who were also struggling to grow their products, by first understanding their customer behaviour and then make the right strategic decisions.

Over the years of learning from our mistakes and facing challenges that we’ve now turned into services — we decided it was time to re-develop our brand to reflect more than just coding. Digital Workroom today is not just an agency, but symbolises a team beyond just developers, who share common goals where each of us are interconnected by skillset. After all, it’s the people who make up a brand and every brand should recognise this as part of their growth.

The Goal

First of all, we must clarify that a rebrand doesn’t necessarily mean a complete transformation and it's important to understand this philosophy. For a business to rebrand, it must be clear of the purpose and goal. There is no “right time” to do it — it’s your own reflective business decision.

When we first had the idea to rebrand, it was definitely not a shower thought but realising that as our clients’ needs have evolved, our team and products have evolved right along with them. However, it's hard to showcase how a business has grown when the brand doesn’t reflect it.

Rebranding allows the opportunity for a business to re-affirm itself in the industry. Our ultimate goal was to reflect the transition from an app development agency to also teams who relish the challenges of UX consultancy, data storytelling, growth marketing, and innovative solutions — an “expansion” that any business will eventually aim to achieve.

The Process

While change is exciting, it’s important not to lose your DNA which is the very thing loyal customers know you for. So to make sure the goal for rebranding was clear, we went back to basics by accomplishing 2 things —

1. Getting a deeper understanding of the brand We kickstarted the process back in mid-2021, first having workshops with the wider team to reiterate and define our core values.

This involved many 1-to-1 conversations across the team, which in the end saw everyone’s alignment as to how they vision Digital Workroom, and its future goals.

2. Getting to know everyone in the team

Like we mentioned earlier, it’s the people who make up the brand. Getting to know the core people who founded Digital Workroom, the story and ways of thinking are really important when it comes to reflecting our values that we want to uphold, even through the changes.

It’s also a chance to go more in-depth to what the team is about; their goals and ambitions so the vision can be portrayed across the brand.

We learnt that innovation and pushing the boundaries of technology were at the heart of everyone's work.

Next Steps…

The second part of building a brand identity is the tone of voice. Like us, this can often take years to build, yet necessary as it dictates how customers feel about the brand and its company culture. After the 1-to-1 conversations, and the whole team were on the same page, we sat down to shape the key messaging for those visiting our website or come across our social profiles.

It was important that everyone’s thoughts were heard and written down, being that through Miro boards, Google Docs or having regular meetings to review ideas. When collaborating cross-teams, you never know when one idea can spark another (despite the remote working conditions during COVID times).

Our design team then began reflecting the brand identity to fit the messaging, taking us into the next phase which involved a selection of visual concepts for the look and feel.

While it’s tempting to jump straight into designing the logo, it’s vital not to overlook the process of exploration, and constructing how it reflects the values and messaging defined earlier from the workshops. This is how customers recognise a brand for possibly generations, and therefore a process that should not be rushed.

If you want a deeper dive into how we approached this, stay tuned to our next blog posts.

The Challenges

But a logo was simply not enough. We took into account that the projects on our website were outdated and for agencies like us, it’s the key to drive potential customers and have them know about the success stories. This led to re-thinking the ways of showcasing Our Works — we learnt the best way to showcase the success of a project is to highlight its impacts through facts and figures.

Since one of our core values were relationships; we didn't want to opt-in for a typical agency website that often lacked the human aspect of the company. Humans crave connection, and so we felt it was significant for clients to know who they were working with, by simply putting faces to a name.

The rebrand was also a collective effort and part of this was ensuring that everyone was involved in the project; sparking the idea behind “Meet the team”.

Our final hurdle was the speed of the site, sometimes taking 10-15 seconds to load which was a red flag when attracting new leads, and (as you may not know!) impacts SEO ranking and search engines to crawl all pages of your site. Our developers were then given the challenge to solve this bottleneck, yet build in a cost-effective way so that it can be easily maintained for years to come.

The Outcome

Despite the challenges of technology and various learnings along the way, we saw the fresh new identity of Digital Workroom and if anything has brought motivation and fueled a lot of energy in the team!

Previous logo (left) and new design (right)

Our new logo is a combination of a wordmark and an icon. The wordmark itself is simple yet modern, while the icon is constructed to edges to convey fluidity in the digital space, representing our mission to go beyond boundaries.

Our developers in the end saw the need to completely rebuild the site with React and Next.js — a web framework that helped us increase its loading speeds by 60%.

It was a big decision, but if you’re building for the future, using the latest technology is necessary and a valuable investment in the long run. This meant that not only was the site faster, but also decreased development time which is always a factor to consider, especially if you’re a business like ourselves who often face time constraints.

Finally, we’d like to highlight the top 5 benefits we found, and for anyone who maybe considering a rebrand:

1. Able to re-iterate and define the core values of the brand
2. A logo constructed to truly represent who you are
3. Re-consider how you want customers to feel by the brand
4. Opportunity to reflect growth and promote new services
5. Revamp the site and (for us) increase its loading speed by 60%

What’s next? (A message from us.)

It’s safe to say that we’ve had our fair share of the rocky road to success and while we celebrate our new look, a rebranding is just another checkpoint in the journey. Luckily for those working in the tech industry, we have the privilege to continuously change and move with the trends, and we at Digital Workroom are not any different.

Since the pandemic, technology has been needed more than ever and as the world quickly adapts to the post-COVID era, we vision data as the most important key to understanding customer habits and how products can adapt to these too.

Under the new image of Digital Workroom, it goes without saying that our goal to impart our knowledge and findings remains unchanged, and now into our brand new newsletter that you can sign up below!

Finally, to our partners and clients — we continue to value our working relationships more than ever. This allows us to continue pushing the boundaries of what is digitally possible; together creating experiences that are innovative, accessible and fun.