It's a natural choice for any startup that grows past its original business plan: the rebrand.
But with any rebrand or name change, there's a lot to consider: the website domain name, the social media accounts, the logo, the office design, the email addresses and more.
For some startups, the process also involves re-inventing its "swag bag" — the t-shirts they wear around the office, the merchandise they hand out at conferences, the water bottles everyone totes around for brand recognition.
When Upskill decided to change its name from APX Labs in June 2016, vice president of marketing Christine Boyd set out to get the entire team involved, including gathering feedback for what their new t-shirts and merchandise would look like. She started with t-shirts because the engineering teams love them, then moved on to items like water bottles, coffee mugs and sunglasses, seeing as they're a wearables tech company.
"A key component is also getting your own internal team rallied around the new company name," Boyd said. "It took building the narrative and getting some of our employees who had worked APX Labs for three, four years rallied around it."
At holiday parties in 2016, the group would let employees take home whatever t-shirts, water bottles and other swag they had left over from the APX Labs brand as stocking stuffers or holiday presents for their kids.
When Upskill moved into a new office this summer, they let their interns rummage through any leftover APX Labs swag — leftover jackets, coffee mugs, etc. — that they could take back to their dorm rooms.
Items like APX Labs laptop stickers can still be found on employees' laptops, right next to their new Upskill stickers, as a way of highlighting where they've come from. Some items were also donated.
The same goes for newly-named Storyblocks, which officially announced its new name from Videoblocks, in mid-September. However, for the Arlington, Va.-based company, it's a bit different. Videoblocks is now the name of a single product under the umbrella of the newly-created Storyblocks. Employees can still use their Videoblocks swag and without feeling outdated. But there's still the question as to what to do with the boxes of unused merchandise.
"There are a couple boxes of old, unused t-shirts that we're figuring out what to do with—ideas have ranged from burying them in a time capsule to sewing them together into a massive swag quilt," said Storyblocks CEO TJ Leonard in an email.
Nonetheless, that didn't stop Stockblocks from rolling out a new suite of merchandise for everyone at their launch party. Everyone received a box with a sweater, t-shirt and a steel water bottle.
"We kept it simple for this first go-around with just our logo, but business cards are up next and we'll be incorporating some of our awesome new images into the designs," Leonard said.
Rebranding a company is much more than just the merchandise and swag bags, as Boyd notes. It's about the story behind the new company name and making everyone is on the same page.
"When I stepped in and the name had been decided, we didn't have a narrative around it," Boyd said. "It was so important because, once we were able to build a narrative, that was when we were able to nail the vision. That was something that, emotionally, people could get really rallied behind."
