Our Favorite Logo Glow-ups from the Past Year

We love a good ✨ glow up ✨ Especially the rebranding kind! At Wayfarer, we work with all kind of founders – some who are just starting their business for the first time and others have been in the game for years. For the seasoned founders, they come to us because something about their branding isn’t feeling right anymore. Maybe they DIYed their logo in the beginning in order to keep costs low or they just had an idea and ran with it. But after years of growing their business, that DIY logo has started to lose its charm. It doesn’t match the quality of their product anymore or the luxury customer experience that they want to create. And it definitely doesn’t stand out among their competitors!

This is where we step in to help them rebrand. ⚡️ But we’ll be honest, rebranding isn’t easy! It takes a lot of care, strategy and mindfulness around what’s really going to usher in this new chapter of business that the client is hoping for.

So we thought it would be fun to walk you through some of our favorite rebrands that we’ve designed lately! Showing how we took the clients original logo that wasn’t working and how we elevated it to a whole new level!

No. 01 / Rebekah J. Designs

Rebekah is a jewlery designer based in Seattle and we’d been swooning over her work far before she ever reached out to work with us! She’d spent years building up a loyal customer base and wholesale parters, but finally had reached a point where she wanted to transition into doing more fine jewelry work. But it wasn’t just about offering new styles with higher quality materials. This transition also meant that her prices would need to increase and she was worried that her DIY branding wasn’t going to reflect a higher price point. That’s why she reached out to us – to elevate her brand and help her feel more confident making this big change with her business!

THE BEFORE:

Rebekah actually had a background in art and graphic design, so her DIY logo was pretty good! But it was very inspired by some of her older jewelry work and didn’t match the style that she was working in now. For fine jewelry, the hand drawn illustrations felt a little too rough/imperfect and the logo font was pretty basic. For her rebrand, we wanted to create something that still kept some of that organic, bold vibe, but with a more sophisticated vibe.

THE AFTER:

We pulled inspiration from Rebekah’s work to create a custom wordmark and monogram logo. We incorporated chunky geometric shapes in the letters, referencing some of the shapes that you’ll find in her jewelry. We also created moments of sharp vs. soft contrast in the logo font – capturing how Rebekah does the same with her work by forming heavy metals into shapes that somehow look fluid and light.

No. 02 / BeautyGARDE

This vegan nail polish brand had been building a large community of customers for 5+ years and had seen a lot of success with their wide range of nail care products. But they grew, their original branding started to fall flat as other big competitors entered their industry. And as they began to plan for pitching their products to larger retailers, they knew that they needed a rebrand to help them land those partnerships and stand out on a national retail shelf.

THE BEFORE:

BeautyGARDE’s old logo was very generic. Just a basic font with a little customization by bolding the “GARDE” part of their name and that was pretty much it. It wasn’t doing anything to really tell their brand story or highlight their unique selling points. Ultimately, there just wasn’t anything too memorable about it. And that’s what you need in order to draw attention on a crowded shelf! So for their rebrand, a big goal for us was to create some kind of symbol that captured their values and product benefits.

THE AFTER:

We designed a custom wordmark logo and a meaningful icon to bring BeautyGARDE’s brand to a whole new level. The wordmark font is sophisticated, but still friendly. And the icon merges a few symbols together:

A shield shape because their products protect your natural nails
Radiating layers to illustrate how their products nourish the nail
A fingernail illustration that’s almost hidden in the middle, making it super clear what they do as a brand.

We were able to use this icon across their product packaging to make it more memorable among competitors and even turned it into a fun brand pattern that was used on their marketing graphics and website.

No. 03 / Caftari

The founder, Shreya, was still in the beginning stages of business when she came to us with a DIY logo that she’d played around with. But she immediately knew that it could be better and hoped that we could help. She wanted to position Caftari as a luxury science-focused fragrance brand. And in a saturated industry like candles, she knew that a unique brand would have a lot of impact in helping her products stand out.

THE BEFORE

Shreya looked to competitors for inspiration when creating her initial DIY logo. She admired the brands that were simple, clean and elevated. But this approach followed too many trends that we see again and again with candles. The fancy script monogram. The basic serif font logo with a location underneath. It all felt very expected and that’s not what we wanted for Caftari. Instead, we wanted to create something that felt innovative and really tapped into the science behind their scents.

THE AFTER

We pulled inspiration from brainwave patterns to help Caftari communicate how their fragrances use aromacology to balance cortisol levels and influence your mood. We integrated a pattern in the “C” monogram logo and designed a custom brainwave pattern to coordinate with each of their main candles. Then we took the concept even further on the product packaging, adding the brainwaves with laser engraving on the ceramic candle vessels and debossing them on the candle boxes. It’s a beautifully subtle and clever way to communicate how each candle impacts your mood in a different way

It’s amazing to see the difference that a rebrand can make, right? On a surface-level, it’s fun to make a brand look prettier. But for us, rebranding is about much more than that. It’s about gaining a new sense of confidence in the future of your business. It’s about finally feeling like your product belongs in those big retail stores and not being afraid to pitch them there. And it’s about finally showing how you do things differently (and better) than your competitors rather than just blending in.

If you’re thinking that it might be time to rebrand, we’re your people! First, go download our pricing guide to learn more about how we want work together. Then head to our client application to officially inquire with us and get started.