Leadership on a rebrand helped close the largest funding round in TurnKey company history.
I led a year-long effort to update TurnKey's visual branding. Investors felt our new brand spoke more directly to family travelers and "mass-affluent" owners of desirable vacation rentals. They rewarded TurnKey with the largest investment to date.
$31M
TurnKey series-D raise
Example of before and after branding on the TurnKey website
The problem
At the time, TurnKey's brand did not adequately reflect the demographics of its aspirational customer. The board suggested that an updated brand would help gain additional rounds of funding. In addition, we needed to increase the quality and consistency of our brand execution.
We started the rebranding process by looking at our company values.
We started our re-branding effort by looking at our core message, and our core audience. Values and customers were the foundation for everything that would follow.
We used data to build profiles of key customer segments.
We cross-referenced various studies to build a profile of our customer segments. As a general approach we looked at the behaviors, needs and profiles of upscale renters and owners.
Factors that would make a non-renter consider a vacation rental. From Phocusrite’s 2016 study “A Market Transformed: Private Accommodations in the U.S.”
A competitive analysis showed how TurnKey could differentiate strongly from other services.
With key fundamentals in place, we started to rework core parts of the TurnKey brand.
The smarter way to vacation rental.
The TurnKey visual branding needed to embody "affordable luxury", fun, consistency, and peace of mind.
Every brand faces the problem of consistency in visual assets, voice, and tone. Our solution to this was multifaceted. The first step was to establish flexible rules for images, color, logo, type, layout, voice, and tone. Each of these areas were addressed in our brand book, which laid out guidelines for brand communicators.
We established a core language and created a brand book.
Next, I created a centralized Sketch brand library to improve our team's design velocity.
Using Illustrator and Sketch's "Library" feature, we were able to give designers fast, flexible access to brand elements and maintain a centralized asset repository that would allow us to keep our brand up-to-date across past and future design files.
With these elements in place, I led the team to remake the TurnKey brand.
We took new photos of our customer-facing service team.
We wanted to represent our field teams in the best light possible. They're the core of our business and the key to making both guests and owners happy.
We built a shareable slide deck for internal use.
We created downloadable MS Office swatches.
MS Word and MS Excel documents don't usually get brand attention. We created swatches for MS Office and instructions to follow for getting access to brand palettes.
Operating manuals and training guides received branded updates.
We made animated introductions for product and marketing videos.
Leadership on TurnKey rebrand helped TurnKey close a $31M series-D round of funding
ClientTurnKey Vacation RentalsYear2017My workLed design team (internal and contract), presented to board of directors, worked with content strategists. As an individual contributor: web design, brochure/print design, logo design, video