The wildest of rebrands
Hotel Engine’s growth story was next-level and they got there without paying much attention to their brand. I came on board as an ACD of Copy, joining a brand team of two, with the promise of a rebrand on the horizon. We settled on a name, secured engine.com domain, and picked a logo at the end of June. In July, we hired a new Creative Director, announced the rebrand and our Series C in September, and rolled out the new brand in October.
Anyone who has ever done a rebrand gets it when I say this was the wildest few months imaginable. I shifted from Copy to Creative Production in August, after recognizing that we needed a plan and some order to this chaos to pull it off. I loved the wrangle of details so much that I shifted into a Head of Creative Ops role, proving that the impossible timeline was, in fact, possible.
We had four months to tell the world about the rebrand, our Series C raise, and our expansion from hotels to a full travel platform—all with a bare bones team. We needed an army of designers and writers, but the accelerated timeline didn't allow us to step out of the work to hire, so we just got to work.
In partnership with our Head of Program Management for Marketing, I created a master asset sheet that became known as the 'Creative Bible'—an audit of every marketing asset, webpage, video, and campaign touchpoint. I prioritized what was feasible by the October launch, assigned assets to internal and external resources, built an approval process that could actually keep pace, and worked through the details of a big media buy in Times Square.
We didn't have any other copywriters on the team, so while I was producing and trafficking hundreds of assets, I was also rewriting the emails, one-pagers, and webpages that made up a huge chunk of the deliverables. 'Hotels' had to become 'all travel,' which shifted our story and positioning in every single way.
In October, we went live. Rebrands take years for most companies but ours took four months with a team unhinged enough to say yes to an impossible timeline and talented enough to actually deliver.
