Easily Amused & Valet worked as sister companies for 3 years. During our time together, we completely rebranded Valet (formerly WP Valet).
In our rebrand, we focused on communicating Valet’s longtime legacy in the WordPress support community. More than just a support agency, what distinguishes Valet is their focus on digital strategy.
Valet was the original WordPress support company. Suddenly, start-up companies appeared offering ‘support’ for a fraction of the price. These lower end support companies offer less value and fewer development skills. How could Valet help consumers distinguish between their knowledgeable, veteran support and less experienced companies?
Fun Fact: Valet was founded by Mason James & Kim Lipari when they couldn’t find a high-end WordPress support team to refer their web clients to. The ‘valet’ in the brand signifies white glove, high-end, concierge service. (Think: Downton Abbey & Mr. Bates.)
The new branding needed to present Valet as a high caliber leader in the support industry, truly communicating their value. It also needed to create brand awareness for all departments at Valet—not just ongoing support.
We spoke with everyone at Valet to understand their user base, target audience, and content strategy—along with their future goals. We ensured that every stakeholder’s concerns were heard and met.
With a clear understanding of the brand’s core fundamentals and a vision for their future growth, we planned out the new image and website.
When our designs were ready, we user tested them to ensure they resounded with our target audiences. Our bold, modern designs make an impact with users and pushed the limits of what’s normally accepted on the web. Visitors frequently write in with opinions and feedback on the design. The design grabs attention and is memorable, while subtly communicating the value and sophistication of the service
“Our brand needed to reflect its long legacy, history, and the value of our service. We’re a grown-up agency, offering our clients a highly experienced and skilled team. Our image needed to match what we're delivering.”
The Valet brand evolved to offer a wide array of services to clients. The branding needed to appeal to broader audiences.
Valet helps digital marketers accomplish their goals. The team provides strategy, development and design support to make websites powerful for conversion. From A/B testing and analytics to SEO and content strategy, Valet works with organizations to help them accomplish their goals.
Got a product that needs a high level of expert support? The Valet team can work as an extension of the in-house support for a product. One example is LearnDash—the most popular LMS plugin on the internet for WordPress. Valet has a long-term relationship with the LearnDash team, assisting with support.
Valet works with business owners to help them craft custom website projects from the ground up. Online business owners come to Valet for consultancy, guidance, research, planning as well as design and development. Valet worked with the Dance of the Deer foundation to develop a membership site.
When agencies need ongoing WordPress support for their clients, where do they turn? Valet is here to help! Jumping in to provide monthly support between development cycles is one way Valet partners with agencies keep their clients happy. Valet also works with agencies to assist with build out on design projects.
During this phase, we identified the ‘look and feel’ for the brand. Our designers created a logo that reflects Valet’s grown-up image and truly speaks to the agency’s heritage. The logo resembles a pocket—something you keep close to you—with the Valet brand inside. The sophisticated serif font and the shield say ‘strength’. The logo adapts well to a favicon or sticker, and it’s easily recognized even scaled to various sizes
Fun Fact: The shield icon for Valet looks like a pocket. What's the reason behind this? In olden days, a valet in the manor was there when you needed him. Branding the 'v' to be in a pocket represents the reliability of the Valet brand. The serif font is elegant, and the sans-serif font looks more like code in a text editor. Lastly, the Valet icon resembles a home plate, because using Valet is a home run choice.
During this phase, we worked on mood boards to identify the look and feel for with the new branding.
During this phase, we worked on additional collateral. Letterhead, proposal templates, powerpoints, t-shirts, conference displays, custom embroidery, business cards, stickers, water bottles—and even custom luggage tags. We set Valet up to show off their new branding everywhere.
We created a content strategy that served as a guideline for the entire brand—including website layout, copy, and imagery. The content strategy started at the beginning of the project, and it carries through long after launch.
Fun Fact: Following the launch of the new brand and website, our team worked with Valet for 7 months to manage their content strategy. We wrote weekly blog posts, developed strategic relationships in the industry, and handled public relations efforts.
Our design team created modern layouts on top of our UX design. We created a minimalist vibe to reflect the maturity and elegant beauty of Valet’s strategy, design and development capabilities. When our designs were complete, our front-end and backend developers brought them to life with custom development.
Once the site was ready to launch, our team went through a vigorous quality assurance phase to ensure everything was perfect. We also took time to train our team on how to use custom Admin functionality. During this phase, we also put the final polish on our copywriting.
After the new Valet website was live, we continued to implement and refine our content strategy. This included weekly meetings to review content publication schedules and content distribution channels, along with analyzing how audiences are interacting with content. Using data from A/B testing and heat maps, we evaluate the effectiveness of our strategies, so we can continually refine and improve them.
Creative Director
Front-end Developer
Project Manager
Back-end Developer
The rebrand shows off Valet’s sophisticated capabilities in strategy, digital marketing, design, and development—inspiring trust. Clients now approach Valet for assistance to ‘help create a grown-up version of their own brand’.
Increase in Social Traffic Since Rebranding
Time Devoted to Helping WordPress Community
Sites Valet Migrated Since Their Start
Terabytes of Space Saved with Migrations
Valet |
Site of the Day |
2016 | valet.io |
Fun Fact: Why did Valet drop the ‘theWP’ in their name? ‘WP’ can stand for ‘web page’ or ‘web presence’ … or ‘WordPress’. During the rebrand, we saw the opportunity to look into domain options. Valet.io is a name that grabs audiences' attention. We researched options and waited over a year (until it was available) to acquire the valet.io domain. Getting away from WordPress was never the goal—avoiding ‘the’ in our URL was a win.
The new branding set Valet apart—showing the agency to be an experienced, high caliber leader in the industry. We helped them increase their reach in the community and drive new business. Their content strategy is engaging visitors and promoting their high-end agency.
