Everything we Learned While Going Through our Rebrand

So we got a new face!

You may have noticed this past week that a lot of things about the PurelyHR brand have changed! And believe you me, no one knows better than we do right now that change can be… uncomfortable. But for the most part, always for the best!

Over the past 6 months, our Marketing and Management teams have been collaborating to really zero in on the who and the why of our business.

PurelyHR was originally founded and created by developers. So one of the first things we discovered in our digging is that embedded within everything we’ve ever built is the sole desire to find a simple solution to a complex problem.

We Know This Because our Entire Product was Built on Experience.

If you don’t know the story, our founder, and president, Jason Gendron, experienced the problem himself with his previous IT company. It seemed like constant lineups at his door with simple requests, most to do with time off requests and their status was keeping him from performing his day-to-day operations. The tedious task of going in and out of his excel spreadsheet to keep track and answer any and all requests had Gendron thinking, there has to be an easier way.

Recognizing that this is our how and not our why was crucial to digging deeper into our brand and truly uncovering the story we want to tell. Aside from being a time off manager with a few extra add-ons, we wanted to go deep into the why behind our product. What is our purpose as an organization, and well, we found out a few things:

“We identify our customer as the HR Decision Maker. With a clientele as diverse as ours, we can’t simply focus on either the CEO or the HR Manager. Instead, we ideate, strategize and build our products with the user in mind – your people. Your humans are truly, your greatest resource and everything we deliver is not only to give time back to the HR Decision Maker but also to give time back to their people.” – Jason Gendron, President & CEO

As a Brand, What do we Believe in?

At PurelyHR, we believe in order to do your best work, you must be your best self. This means, instead of feeding into the hustle concept of working until your knuckles bleed and burning the midnight oil 7 nights a week – we encourage teams to take the appropriate amount of time off from work so that when they are in the office, they are actually able to operate at their full potential.

We take pride in the fact that we operate in a very intimate section of the Human Resources space, the moment where your people and your business part and they indulge in the things that matter most to them. We want to be the catalysts for your employee’s to do more of the things they love. And trust us, you want this too.

We believe that being productive means getting a lot of things done, but being effective means getting the right things done. We think that’s the epitome of everything we do at PurelyHR. We make your people our people too because we know how important their personal time is to not just them, but to your bottom line as well.

So, Now That we Know Who we Are – What Changed?

At first, we thought just our website needed a good refresh. Our old site appeared dated and when we conducted our research and focus groups a lot of the feedback came back to a few simple pillars.

Trust – The user didn’t feel like they could trust us right away for a few reasons. For starters, we weren’t clearly identifying exactly who we were and what we offered right away.

Modern – The majority of users we surveyed felt like our website wasn’t current (and we absolutely agreed). It seems silly to update a website just for the sake of updating a website but in this case the look and feel of our previous site actually attributed to the trust factor we touched on above.

Consistency – In marketing today, cohesiveness in a message is crucial. If a company or brand is very clear in their values and what they stand for as an organization, once again a potential consumer is more likely to trust you.

We walked the walk but weren’t talking the talk.

We even had a Trust page where a very strong value was stated that we still very much believe in. “Trust is hard earned.” This was a major lesson for us because we wanted to do more than just say it.

With our new face online we wanted to tackle the three pillars we encountered in our initial research. We kept the new site clean and clear to give it a modern flavour while also allowing the user to focus in on the important information being delivered on each page.

We switched up the copy and headers for certain sections with impact statements so the user can really feel the message we’re trying to convey.

And we made sure that no matter what, we stuck to our brand values.

We know, we know… Every HR tech company ever wants to “put the ‘human’ back into ‘Human Resources’”. It’s a regurgitated cliche that’s become stagnant and we believe the way to fix that is to just actually be real with people. In our office, we’re goofy and fun but we also really care about our customers, so that’s what we want our brand to show. We think a lot of businesses out there can relate to that.” – Rejean Martin, Marketing Manager

The Transition

In every project, things are going to appear that perhaps you hadn’t originally considered. We were no exception.

As we dived deeper into the website redesign our marketing team couldn’t help but notice something was happening to our original visual collateral (ie our brand video and visual identity). They were simply becoming inconsistent.

We knew that cohesiveness and consistency were really important things to our brand in this new era of PurelyHR so we decided to rebuild from scratch.

Module Icons

Starting with our module icons, that were just as dated as the website was needed their own little refresh! We opted for a more inclusive Staff™ icon that better represented the female-dominated Super Admins and HR Decision Makers that lead 2000+ teams using PurelyHR all over the world.

With e-signature software trending in HR right now, we see the opportunity to advance our Warnings™ module to function for more than just employee infraction documentation and we wanted the icon to be reflective of that (and not workplace safety ⚠?).

With those new additions, we refreshed our Time-Clock™, Time-Sheet™ and Time-Off™ modules to match.

Explainer Video

Next on our docket was our explainer video. Every business has that 2-3 minute video that showcases the brand values as well as the products and/or services you offer.

Still leading with our focus on trust and consistency in message, we decided to ditch the digitally animated brand video for a live action video that featured real visuals of our product and the beautiful faces of our team members!

Within the narration, we clearly explain who we are as an organization. We wanted to take this opportunity to not only show ourselves but showcase just how diverse our clientele really is.

The fact that we don’t have a specific industry that we target has been so rewarding for us. It validates for us further that humans are every business’ most important resource and should be treated as such with fair time off policies that allow them to refocus and continue being as effective as possible.

Our Visual Identity

Our visual identity (or our logo) was probably the thing we were most certain needed to be changed.

After all… We were very close to a certain popular rappers brand of headphones.

We have to laugh at ourselves for this one. The Beats’ upside down lowercase “b” also seems to be one of the most overused, and generic logos in the world because we see it absolutely everywhere, from Pinterest to BambooHR. Even Pepsi uses it…

So, it goes without saying that we really wanted something that represented us well, was simplistic in design, and consistent with our overall message.

We already knew a few things going in.

We know that our vision was to be THE ultimate leave management tool for small and medium-sized businesses looking to change the world.

Our clientele is diversely made up of nonprofits, hospitals, schools, tech companies building the next unicorn startup, and tons of business services trying to help them do so, and we want to continue to embrace that.

We also knew that as an organization we were very focused on encouraging, empowering and educating our clients on the benefits of providing more time off to their employees through powerful product development and content.

This means that with everything we do, from developing new products to planning our own content strategy – we’re focused on our people (and that means yours too!).

That’s why we’ve woven so much of our brand narrative into our company video. We want to be building more than just an HR tech product, we want it to be the solution that helps managers connect more with their team by helping them invest more time into the things they love.

We know that humans are the most important resource of every business. They’re your customer and they’re the people who run it for you, so it only seemed fitting that our new logo symbolizes the heart shape, but we wanted to make sure it was our own.

For an added twist, we also incorporated very popular “vacation logo” trends and separated the two sides of the heart to add room for the shape of a drop of water, symbolizing the “pure” aspect of our brand.

For us, 2018 has been all about purpose. Ironically, as a leave management tool, we help you streamline your time off policies so your employees can re-energize. That’s exactly how we feel about our new look and feel, re-energized and re-focused.

As an organization, we aligned internally with so many of our company values – we felt our visual brand deserved to represent that in fresh new and authentic way.

Have any questions or feedback on the new look? We know a very eager social media manager who would LOVE to hear from you!

You can find us on Facebook & Linkedin or tweet us @purelyhrsoft!