Bindable Rebrand.
In 2017 the company, founded as MassDrive, had grown rapidly. We were known as either MassDrive, Next Generation Insurance or MyLifeProtected depending on when and under what context you were introduced to us.
As we were making our transition into the technology services space with Policy Crusher, we needed to clean up our brand act. As conversations started about which of the three 'established' brands we wanted go with, I suggested a total rebrand. That wasn’t a popular idea, but I knew the timing was right and there was a clear need to start fresh from a branding perspective. With limited time (again), I got to work.
I started with some word mapping. Just getting words down on paper felt like progress. From my word mapping exercise I picked a couple of ideas to continue to work through. I searched for the domain availability, did some market research to make sure no one else was using these marks and ended up with two ideas to continue to work through, Instnce and Bindable.
Instnce was based on the idea that customers would be using an ‘instance’ of our platform to build their insurance business. I felt that Instnce, with it's odd spelling, felt very cold and mechanical.
Bindable on the other hand felt more warm and rounded. It was a friendlier name that fit the culture of our company.
The name Bindable works on a few different levels.
The companies main source of leads at the time was through affinity marketing. A group of people bound together through a common interest, affiliation or trade. With our shift into tech services, the industry term 'bind' makes perfect sense, as our products were meant to help customers and agents get to their 'bindable' quote.
I didn't want Bindable to look like every other insurtech out there. The use of red was a deliberate choice to stand out from the blue green sea of insurtech logos. The script typeface was chosen to give the whole logo a sense of roundness that I feel speaks to the warm, friendly nature of the identity.
Working it.
The first version of the Bindable website was put together in a fews days leading up to a major press release. It got the job done, but never truly served the brand the way it should. In 2019 we decided to fix that with a fresh design and a better organized set of products. We had found with the previous iteration of the site that we knew what we did, but it wasn't exactly clear to people with whom we didn't have an established relationship. As we tried to hammer out our product suite, we found ourselves talking in circles. I decided to organize all our products and services into four buckets that became the Bindable Platform.
When it came time to design the site I had an oddly difficult time getting anything into Sketch that I actually liked. I had trapped in myself into the hero image pattern and needed to get out. I decided to take a markedly different approach to the design this time and exclude photographs from the main content pages. Getting into Illustrator and working through the product concepts ended up being the catalyst I needed to finally get a site design I was pleased with.
