Rebranding during an acquisition

Sunsetting 7Geese during the integration with Paycor

THE CONTEXT

In order to fully integrate with Paycor, we had to remove all references of 7Geese, logos, and goose whimsy in the application. We had 10 weeks.

Timeline:

3 months

Team:

Caitlyn

Product Manager
Engineering team of 5

My Role:

Lead design

Audited the 7Gesse app for every mention of the app or visual of a goose
Worked alongside stakeholders for system wide rebranding

RESEARCH

Discover and define

The team and I went through the entire application and found every place 7Geese appeared. This meant combing through 100+ email templates, exported files, presentation modes, URLs, and integrations like Slack and Teams.

Design principles

I created and followed a set of design principles to help inform design decisions for the rebrand:

Be consistent: Be as consistent with the Paycor colour palette as possible.
Keep it simple: Keep the rebranding simple so that implementation is easy and quick.
Be transparent: Communicate clearly and truthfully with standalone customers.

The user

We had two groups to think about:

Our previous standalone customers
Our new Paycor customers

We wouldn’t be able to hit our integration milestone for all customers by May 3, so we split up the timeline.

We would have a full rebrand ready for Paycor customers by May 3rd. Since we wanted to ease the standalone customers into the rebranding, on May 3rd they would see a logo saying “7Geese, a Paycor company.” By May 27th, there would be a complete rebrand for everyone and we would sunset the 7Geese brand.

Login

Since we were still honouring our standalone clients, they needed their own login page. I had a few ideas but thinking about our design principle, I decided to go for a simplistic design. I removed the illustrations and turned the background into a lighter grayscale version. I then adjusted the content to match Paycor’s colour palette.

Integrations

I worked closely with developers to see how rebranding would work with our integrations like Slack and Teams.

CONCLUSION

Takeaways

It was a long, and tedious process but we were able to hit our deadlines. It was important to be thorough but it was equally important to keep a little bit of the whimsy that made 7Geese so special. With permission, we kept a couple easter eggs as an homage.

THE CONTEXT

In order to fully integrate with Paycor, we had to remove all references of 7Geese, logos, and goose whimsy in the application. We had 10 weeks.

Timeline:

3 months

Team:

Caitlyn

Product Manager

Engineering team of 5

My Role:

Lead design

Audited the 7Gesse app for every mention of the app or visual of a goose

Worked alongside stakeholders for system wide rebranding

RESEARCH

Discover and define

The team and I went through the entire application and found every place 7Geese appeared. This meant combing through 100+ email templates, exported files, presentation modes, URLs, and integrations like Slack and Teams.

Design principles

I created and followed a set of design principles to help inform design decisions for the rebrand:

Be consistent: Be as consistent with the Paycor colour palette as possible.

Keep it simple: Keep the rebranding simple so that implementation is easy and quick.

Be transparent: Communicate clearly and truthfully with standalone customers.

The user

We had two groups to think about:

Our previous standalone customers

Our new Paycor customers

We wouldn’t be able to hit our integration milestone for all customers by May 3, so we split up the timeline.

Login

Integrations

I worked closely with developers to see how rebranding would work with our integrations like Slack and Teams.

CONCLUSION

Takeaways

It was a long, and tedious process but we were able to hit our deadlines. It was important to be thorough but it was equally important to keep a little bit of the whimsy that made 7Geese so special. With permission, we kept a couple easter eggs as an homage.