Professional Look & Feel Made Simple With Tailor Brands
Tailor Brands, founded by a trio of friends, was built with the intention to empower small businesses with affordable and accessible digital tools to rebrand their business. Here, Co-Founder Yali Saar shares the friends’ founding story, the significant impact of consistent and strong branding to the overall growth and success of a business, and what’s next for Tailor Brands.
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Photography courtesy of Tailor Brands
How did you get where you are today?
Like many great things in my life, I founded Tailor Brands with Tom Lahat and Nadav Shatz by chance. I grew up in Tel Aviv and was earning my bread as an actor, both in the national theater and TV. I think I shot over a 100 episodes on the kids channel before realizing that acting wasn’t for me. I felt like I was reciting text when I really wanted to write it. So I did a career change and ended up in Journalism, first as a reporter for Timeout Magazine, which was an easy shift from acting, and later on as a war zone correspondent. I wrote stories from Judah and Sumaria, Gaza and more. When I was finishing up there, I was offered a job as a political spokesperson and eventually ended up doing creative for some ad agencies. I moved to NYC to attend Columbia University and while in school started an initiative called Raising the Bar, bringing people from lower socio-economic backgrounds to pursue advanced degrees by rebranding education as something a bit more hip. We grew pretty fast and the organization is now active in NYC, San Fransisco, Sydney and Hong Kong. When I got the opportunity to work with Tom and Nadav, I jumped on it, we were all friends for a long time and knew that we wanted to work with each other. We were all between projects and realized there is no better time than then.
We recently received a branded set of beautiful mugs from Alaska, alongside a very heartwarming letter from a client of ours that told us that thanks to us he was able to attend his first maker show and get clients. We had a small coffee shop owner on the East Coast that called to tell us that only after rebranding with us he got the vision of where his business was going – he opened 2 more locations since and now owns a chain. From apple farms in Germany to accountants in Boston, we work with over 500,000 businesses and freelancers worldwide, helping them redefine their story. For each of them, the effect is a little different, but at the end of the day, we believe that in all cases great branding can make a difference. The difference between a small coffee shop failing or becoming a multi-billion dollar franchise. The difference of customers paying $5 or $15 for the sandwich you make. Great branding has always required great budgets, setting a barrier of entry for many projects and small business out there. Tailor was created to empower ideas by enriching them in an automated and affordable way.
Some studies have shown that 52% of people don’t return to certain stores because they don’t like their aesthetics and that 84.7% of people say that color is a primary reason they buy a product. We all know that it takes people seconds to finalize their first impression and make a decision. In my eyes, this proves that the look & feel of a company’s logo & branding greatly impacts the overall growth and success of the business. Just think of the amount of times you had to choose between two coffeeshops based on the sign they had out. In your head, you were already associating a certain aesthetic (now the rustic style is trending in the industry) as a sign of quality coffee. We often pay more for something that is packaged differently, it’s not because we like the packaging, it’s because we judge a book by its cover. I am no expert on interior design but I do believe that when it comes to creative roles, this equation becomes even stronger for the client. How can I trust someone to design my house if he can’t design a good looking logo?
Consistency is key in all business branding. Make sure your website, social pages, business cards, business proposals all speak the same language. It will be required as your brand becomes more recognizable. Make sure you know what your primary color is, the fonts you use. My advice is trying to design a brand that correlates with your interior design style.
Tailor Brands greatly reduces the cost of of design by using algorithms to create logos, but there’s also the cost of printing and shipping. Can you name a few printing services you would recommend to have Tailor Brand-designed business cards printed?
Moo.com is probably the best printing option out here. High quality paper that makes a difference and really elevates your brand. Zazzle and Vistaprints are also great and of course any local printer you trust and want to support. Two things I recommend are paying attention to the thickness of the card and avoiding glossy options whenever possible.
I recently had a conversation with one of Adobe’s first investors. He told me that when they told people that designers are going to sketch on their computers, people laughed at the prospects of digital sketches ever getting to the quality of hand design. Can you really imagine a designer not using Photoshop or Illustrator today? We couldn’t produce half of the things we wanted. Tech’s positive impact is all around us – it just sometimes takes us longer to acknowledge it.
The first logo we designed was very simple – a beautiful scripted typeface that didn’t draw too much attention and left a lot of room for our product to shine. As we grew, and the brand itself became more recognizable, it was important for us to give it more space. Our name suddenly had a positive impact for prospective clients and we wanted to draw more attention to it. It also came after a year and a half working – and we wanted the logo to represent the company we have become. When we designed our first logo, we were three people in a garage – we wanted something young and playful. As our team grew, each member poured more personality into our work. We wanted our new logo to embody all of that; the pencil, the heart and our love for typography.
I can only say that the team more than doubled itself in the past two months and we are still hiring. Business is good 🙂 .
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