Over the past 3-4 weeks it has been hard to blog because of how busy I have been with my online custom t-shirt company, Coed Monkey.  It all started last October when I got an idea for a brand new ordering system that would revolutionize the way people order shirts online (I’ll tell you more about this in another post sometime), then it continued when I interviewed 15 web companies to find the right fit and now with re-branding and re-positioning my company for the new website in November.   Following the tried and true branding methods of branding/positioning guru Al Ries, here’s a sneak peak at what will be coming in the future of Coed Monkey…

This is our “Big Face” logo that is our main logo, but I don’t like how intricate the design is or how many colors are in it.  The text get’s lost and I wanted a fresh face for the new site, so you can see the difference on the right… You’ll also notice the color change.  This will look cool on our site and also as a Favicon next to the web browser.

This is our “Ice Cream” logo, which earned that name because it reminded me of an old school ice cream shop sign.  This will be the main logo that is on the top left of our site from now on as we try to position our company as a trusted and hassle-free online custom t-shirt company… so the Big Face logo will be secondary to this so that people constantly see our company name instead of a monkey face that they might forget.

We used to emphasize Trust by having this logo to the left, but to increase our branding with the monkey we’ve put it in the new monkey face to reiterate the statement that we are trying to convey.

Our old tagline was cocky, bold and arrogant… but kind of the tagline that you are taught to make in marketing classes.  However, what did it do for us when you compare this tagline with our biggest competitors that people actually recognize?  People don’t assume that we are the best because we say it… in fact, it doesn’t help us because we are not positioning ourselves any different from our competition besides saying “we’re the best…” but what does that do?  now we are emphasizing “Hassle-Free” which our competition does not emphasize.

This is going to be the standard shirt design that we give away at Residence Life conferences from now on… instead of giving away a shirt with our logo that no one really wants to wear past that day or at the gym.

Well, there you go… about 3 months of work condensed in one blog post.  What do you think?