As you’re reading this post, we’re guessing you’d have noticed our new logo, a blazing new set of colors, and a playful new website—but we wanted to share more about what’s happening and why.
In 2012, we started as a Restaurant POS (Point of Sale) software from an experiment born in a North Indian specialty restaurant in New Delhi.
Ten years down the line serving 10,000+ restaurants in 50 countries, we’ve come a long way in becoming one of the most diverse and deep restaurant technology platforms globally.
It was time to refresh to reflect our growth, convey our differentiation in an ever-changing world, and align our brand to our bold new product vision.
This is our rebrand story.
Why did we decide to rebrand
As a bootstrapped company, we had a humble beginning; we started with a small team of 8 members. Our friends and ex-colleagues came together and did everything from building the product, selling, and marketing to customer service.
Today Posist has grown from two co-founders to over 150 employees working across time zones; we launched multiple products, onboarded thousands of restaurants, won some of the most challenging battles, and learned from our mistakes in this decade-long journey. But one thing that hadn’t changed over the past ten years — until today — was the Posist brand itself. We all were comfortable with it and liked it the way it has always been.
But with changing times, as we moved beyond just POS software to becoming a larger unified tech platform for restaurant chains, our visual brand and messaging needed a refresh to match what we stand for.
So in early 2021, we knew that the time had come to make some changes. This is the story (step by step) of how Posist underwent a brand refresh.
Step 1: Brand assessment- Where we stand
As we assessed our business and brand at the beginning of 2021 and navigated through the second wave of COVID-19, we noticed three things.
One, we started observing that our conversations with customers, partners, and prospects were having a more significant impact on their overall business. Our communications required us to represent the scale and impact of our platform. We needed to communicate our product offerings and the value we provided to our customers in a compelling way.
Two, we saw that our client base was shifting towards mid-market and large restaurant chains and the complexities of their business were much greater, increasing with the challenging times. The role of a platform like Posist was more than a billing and inventory software; it is shifting towards improving bottom-line efficiency on the back of insightful data and analytics. We wanted to address the growing importance of a unified platform.
And three, we saw a shift in the industry and competition. Our brand was aging as brands tend to do overtime. We needed to rebrand to build cohesion around our offerings, events, and content and design a message that illustrates a strong direction for the organization while conveying to restaurants the genuine need to move to the platform- the future.
Step 2: Crafting the messaging
The scope of the rebrand was significant, and we knew this was not going to be a one-person job, so we got the A team (Our Co-founders, Marketing, Sales, and Operations teams) together to do our internal rebranding workshop. The workshop aimed to find the answers we were seeking from within before asking the outside world (or hiring an agency to do this for us).
The core concepts for the rebrand came from a series of conversations with customers, partners, and employees. Along the way, we learned a few things about going through a complete corporate rebrand.
We took inspiration from several rebranding workshop frameworks and specifically loved toolkits and processes defined in a rebranding guide by Column Five Media.
We created a very focused workshop that provided a foundation for rebranding. At the end of the workshop, we had answers to our new positioning (definition, purpose, promise, mission, and vision).
The following statements are what came out of our discussions.
- OUR VISION: A world where restaurants are free from the struggle for efficiency and can focus on what they do the best – serve great food
- OUR MISSION: Accelerate the transition to the cloud and enable bottom-line efficiency at scale
- OUR PURPOSE: We make restaurants prosperous globally
Step 3: Co-creating the visual identity
This was the most fun task at hand. By the end of the messaging workshop, we knew we had a unique culture at POSIST and an industry-leading platform, but that didn’t seem to be cutting through the universe of restaurants we were engaging with.
To address this gap, we had to do something different that would stand out. Create a brand that would take us into the future—and show the world who we are—we wanted it to tie together the three core pillars of what makes Posist- Our platform, people, and customers.
Initial variations of the logo
As a company, we are obsessed with technology innovation and in love with groundbreaking ideas. But we understand technology and innovation cannot simply create an impact without those who make every day count.
It is an interplay among the people and technology platform centered around our customers that makes our world a party of its own.
People, Platform & Customers: An interplay like no other
In the orbit of Posist, our customers ( from 1 to 1,000+ restaurant chain operators) are the gravitational force around which our platform and people revolve to keep restaurants powered up all the time.
Just like one of the unique orbital formations in the universe- the co-orbital configuration.
There is only one pair of these in the solar system— Janus and Epimetheus moons of Saturn. The two moons’ orbits are so close, but they never collide because of their gravitational influence. These natural satellites have an extraordinary relationship and make for a tremendous planetary dance.
Inspired by the co-orbital configuration, we derived our own Corbi, an orbital formation of our platform and people around our customers that keep the perfect momentum of these three core elements of the Posist universe.
The Posist Corbi
Here are the parts that form the Posist Corbi
Our platform and team extend into several sub-departments, and we visualized each of their roles with a unique color scheme.
Choice of Colors
Alongside the redesigned monogram, we had to pick the brand’s color palette, which goes beyond visual boundaries to define the brand personality.
Because we had multiple elements to present in the monogram, we decided to go with subtle colors that stem from the blue and green of our original logo. The color shades were carefully chosen to give a fluid look to the monogram, soothing to the eyes and blending naturally with all the platform components and people formation.
Our biggest takeaways
1. Make sure that your business case for a rebrand is solid. It’s not just a cosmetic overhaul. At the end of the day, if your business case is not strong enough for the core team to get involved,- the answer is simple: don’t do it.
2. Get your core team involved early. They will give you the more profound insight needed to articulate and position the brand.
3. Discuss, align, and articulate your company’s vision, mission, and purpose. If you already have them written down, review them to see if it still holds up.
4. Initially, a few backs to back days of coworking upfront will help build shared understanding vs. spreading this out over several weeks.
5. Agencies can be helpful but they follow and visualize the domain knowledge you already have. It’s unlikely to form them to generate and find the insights out of your vision for you. Instead, bring together your own team and specialist from different departments who understand your business well.
Credits
We leaned on a few partners to help guide us through the logo designing process: Srish & Alkesh’s team at A1 Future helped us think through who we wanted to become as a brand. Their first iterations of the logos became the thinking blocks to see our imagination come to life. Despite leaning on the partners for expertise, the entire leadership team contributed to the nearly 8-month-long process.
Ashish Tulsian, our co-founder & CEO, aka Chief Everything Officer, focused on the overall brand positioning and logo concept formation.
Sakshi Tulsian, our co-founder & Chief Revenue Officer, contributed to running the website development and design along with our design geek Jitender Sharma.
Ajay Singh, our Chief Growth Officer, helped us with valuable insights and the customers’ voices to ensure we have a holistic approach to designing the branding and messaging.
Akshay Cherian, Co-founder of Biz Sherpa, played a crucial role in conducting brand messaging workshops and bringing the critical attributes of the messaging to life.
Nikunj Kewalramani, Communications lead, orchestrated the branding project by coordinating multiple departments, agencies, and in-house teams while executing the rebranding.
Our in-house graphic team, headed by Jitender Sharma, took the lead in designing the logo, colors, font selection, website design, and the mammoth exercise to convert our existing assets with the new branding.
Of course, many others played a role in this transition and bringing our new brand into life. A big shout out to all the Product, HR, Admin, Sales & Marketing teams for pitching in with their ideas. We would not have achieved this without you.
Thank you to the moon and back <3