ShipStation Brand Evolution
ShipStation is a premier order management and shipping software helping merchants, small and large, streamline their business operations. By seamlessly integrating with top marketplaces, selling channels, and shipping carriers, the cloud-based application centralizes order processing and shipping label creation.
I worked with other members of the design and content teams to identify key areas where our content wasn’t beset communicating our brand message, interview stakeholders, and gain customer insight into our brand efforts.
Team
Noah Suppin: Senior Designer
Austin Faggard: Designer
Claire Queally: Web Designer
Copy: Maria Fagerland, James Messer
Key Problems We Identified
Inconsistent Brand Messaging
Because the marketing and product teams worked separately, there were many different ideas on how we should present the product and communicate its value. Our brand materials often communicated the technical abilities of product and its many features but the context to how those features created successful online merchants was lost in translation.
Lack of Accessibility
A key initiative in evolving ShipStation’s brand was making the website match up to WCAG standards. From a brand perspective this meant looking closely at our color palette and and how it was used across channels and our use of typography.
Dated Look & Feel
The inconsistency between the dated looking website and other marketing channels undermined legitimacy of the product and broke down trust with the consumer. We wanted to create a seamless customer journey from first interaction to subscribed customer; having design material that felt relevant to our user-base and consistent across channels.
No Real Guidelines
The lack of fully realized brand guidelines not only created an inconsistency across brand materials but also affected how efficient the marketing design team could work. Without a source of truth on visual branding, every project felt like creating a brand from scratch.
Color Palette
To create a new and better working palette for ShipStation, we focused on building around the bright green that symbolized the success of a merchant using our platform. The palette needed hierarchy, when the legacy green is used it should draw attention to important content and CTAs. By adding a darker green, navy, and neutral sand tone as part of the primary palette, we established harmony around our green instead of having it compete with other equally bright and saturated colors.
Insights
“
ShipStation is really a technical company and we’re just now getting into relationship-building.”
— Charla Session-Reed, ShipStation Brand Manager
“
The customer voice — where is it in all of that?” (refering to the current brand)
— Marc Van Bree, Head of Partner Marketing
Typography
ShipStation’s primary typeface was Roboto, a UI font meant for Android operating systems. When used across branding materials, ShipStation’s message and appeal were often lost to the clunky and dated feel that Roboto gave them.
We wanted a typeface that portrayed the power and efficiency of the application but with a bit more elegance so naturally we settled on Graphik. Designed by Christian Schwartz in 2009, Graphik was created for “ maximum flexibility in communication,” mirroring the flexibility ShipStation gives to merchants through powerful shipping workflows and automation features.
The Website
As the top source for trials and signups, it was imperative that we made the owned properties as clear and simple as possible to give customers the information they needed to find out more about the product and sign up for a trial. The current .com suffered from a myriad of issues ranging from lack of accessibility, to an outdated visual look and feel, misuses of stock photography and inconsistent UI components.
Rather than rip out the architecture and start from scratch, we decided to start with visual updates and a reworked navigation. The next phase will be to work with product marketing on any updates to the user flow and changing the architecture of the site to create a smoother user journey.
