Raedan rebrand – Our Story

I’ve been asked by a few friends and clients how we went about our re-brand, why in 2012 we changed our name and how did we reach a decision on the more recent branding changes.  As such I thought I’d jot them down here in case it is of use to anyone else.

WHAT’S IN A NAME

Choosing a name can be a long winded and complicated process for any business, so where to start.  The original temptation, like so many professional firms was to use the family name, we are a family business after all but Bareham & Bareham just didn’t work for us!

I found out that Bareham had Anglo Saxon or Old English origins, the original meaning supposedly being “hill-settlement”, not that exciting but it gave us a train of thought, are there any Anglo Saxon words that have relevant meaning for our business.  Thanks to Google and Wikipedia I found two good sources of Anglo Saxon words, it wasn’t long before we found the verb rǣdan :

1. to advise
2. to interpret, explain
3. to interpret words and letters; to read

It’s literal meaning is clearly related to letters rather than numbers, giving us the work read, however, it also applies to general advice and explanation and we like to pride ourselves on our ability to help our clients understand their business financials.

The true pronunciation is ree-dan but for the sake of our branding we dropped the ǣ and as such have moved towards ray-dan.

BRAND DIRECTION

The overall feel of the brand, our website, letterhead, business cards and so on, we left to professional!  We employed Richard Stott, now of Proof Of Work, to come up with a brand that appealed to him and his colleagues, after all we work very closely with clients in creative and entertainment industries.  Who better to tell us what creative like, than a creative!

We wanted, clean and simple.  It needed to reflect our focus on technology whilst still having a connection to our traditional ethics.

The cluttered websites often used by service companies must be avoided, where we tried to tell you absolutely everything we can do in long and tiresome detail.  Most people coming to our site know we’re accountants, why give them pages of information telling them we do …. accounts.

Of course, the site must be responsive and mobile friendly.

Richard came back with a clean, simple white on black concept which we loved from the start and whilst I can admit we over tinkered with elements, I found the letterhead the hardest to agree on, everything fell quite quickly into place.

WHAT NEXT?

Well, hopefully for a while at least, nothing!  It’s been a great process and it has made us all focus on what we want the business to be and how we should position ourselves.

I would definitely recommend using professionals!  As with any decision it can be easy for small companies to focus on cost cutting “I/we can do that ourselves, let’s save the money” but whilst the monetary cost can be obvious, the cost of distraction from you core business isn’t.

Most of all I hope our clients and anyone who visits the site loves what we’ve done as much as I do.