SHUTTERFLY
It’s About You
The personalized gifts space over the past 20 years has never been more saturated- brands fought for market share while brand and customer loyalty were limited to merely a discount being offered. With an expression reflective of holiday drive times rather core differentiators, Shutterfly was in a race for higher discounts to retain its core customers, challenged (as most competitors were) with expanding its relevance to younger demographics. Meanwhile, Shutterfly the consumer brand had to rearchitect its company strategy as a family of brands (with Shutterfly Inc. the parent brand), all while reinventing processes internally to support the biggest initiative in its short but mighty history.
Brand Strategy & Architecture //// Brand Expression //// CRM Strategy //// UX/UI Development //// Product Strategy
Based on user testing and egagement, the in-house team rallied around the concept that behind every photo taken at any time, are layers of memories that are triggered, or, “ignited.” What does “ignited memories kept in your mind and heart” look like? These layers of memories created a word tree to help us explain and narrate the concept to key stakeholders, before presenting the new identity. It did such a good job of explaining the depths of our users emotions and memories tied to their photos, they became part of the expression itself.
With the simple “Ignite” concept - focusing on memories important to YOU - a new expression was born.
A brand expression which reminded all of us that Shutterfly enables - not creates - your moments to live on.
One of my proudest (and least visual) accomplishments during my time at Shutterfly was the creation of a new process and working model.
This model’s purpose was multi-faceted, serving to help educate, motivate and inspire teams across creative, marketing and business units, so that the new rebrand work could be seen as a valuable asset to all KPIs and success metrics. When you can provide clarity as the Brand Creative Director not just with your direct team, but to c-suite and leadership, trust becomes a key biproduct that empowers every employee at every level.
If you got this far, thank you.
Although this case study focuses on the core Shutterfly consumer brand, a parallel requirement was to rebrand the “family of brands” (Shutterfly Inc) to reflect a multi-brand strategy while differentiating Shutterfly Inc. from its Shutterfly consumer label. Work included brand architecture, identity, internal process and team alignment as well as employment brand and environment.
There’s a lot more to this work, but I’m sparing you a longer page…
